


A Game Of Soldiers

by Snapjack



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: F/M, Implied Relationships, Tauriel/Legolas friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-02
Updated: 2015-11-02
Packaged: 2018-04-29 16:08:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5133911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snapjack/pseuds/Snapjack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are a notable lack of entertainment options available to one in an elvish jail. Once you have flipped a coin a few thousand times, counted all the pebbles in the rocky floor, and exhausted all possible hiding places for the good-luck rune-stone your mother gave you before you left on your staggeringly ill-advised journey with your uncle and your brother and ten other dwarves, you really have only one thing left to occupy your time. </p><p>It’s exactly what you think it is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. How A Raven Feels

There are a notable lack of entertainment options available to one in an elvish jail. Once you have flipped a coin a few thousand times, counted all the pebbles in the rocky floor, and exhausted all possible hiding places for the good-luck rune-stone your mother gave you before you left on your staggeringly ill-advised journey with your uncle and your brother and ten other dwarves, you really have only one thing left to occupy your time.

 

It’s exactly what you think it is.

 

Kíli lays on his back in his cell, fist purling over the end of his cock, looking up the curving stone ceiling of an elfish hall, and fancies he is falling off the great spinning earth, into the stars beyond. Tonight, in love for the first time in his life, he feels like someone has peeled back the layers of his sight that notice barriers and walls, leaving only the deep and penetrating insight into the nature of things that some of the older dwarves refer to as Dark Sight. Granted, the elders usually use the term to mean they’ve cottoned to an incipient earthquake, or that they’ve smelled a couple’s divorce some months before the warhammers start flying, but Kíli can see now that these are minor party tricks, _minor_ , compared to the stunning awareness that love can provide.

 

And love has come with an Elvish name. Tauriel, with her sly smiles, those crooked and alien ears, that strangely set jaw that Fíli called “mannish” (Kíli will make him pay for that comment when he’s out of this cell, Durin knows)—Tauriel has snatched back all the curtains that hid the world from his sight, and now Kíli knows how a raven feels, hovering over the land, seeing all living things and the linkages between them. But a fierce throb from his cock yanks him back down to the earth, reminding him of who he is. Dwarf, tied to the earth, as grounded as it gets. He never thought he would find beauty in the refined and elongate lines of an elf, and indeed, he hasn’t—what draws him to Tauriel is not what is elven about her but what is _not_. Delicate as they are, elves have always reminded Kíli of fragile teacups: pretty to look at but useless for the needs of a man. But Tauriel, Tauriel is different. There is something unrefined there, something harsh in the lines of her face, a carnality playing about her lips, something that keeps her from being all coolness and starlight to him. She cannot hide the animal in her, that is it—the flesh in her cries out to him to be uncovered, and reddened, and gladdened under his hand.

 

As his own hand quickens, his arousal feels like a ley line, all magic and fire, threading its way up from the depths, linking him up to the sky where Tauriel clearly lives, in those arching trees with her ethereal people. He wonders if she can feel this golden fire too, if his hands could pull her down just as she pulls him upward, if he could make her feel the pull of the core, the one that draws all dwarves eternally back towards the great molten heart of the earth. He feels certain he _could_ , if only she were here in this cell with him—he’d start by tugging aside that red curtain of hair, finding a tender spot on her neck to work, burying his hand in her skirts as he pulled her onto his lap—but no, Tauriel would not want to be handled like a common barmaid. In Kíli’s (limited) experience, warrior women take what they want, and he entertains briefly the thought of her throwing a leg over, flicking her long green skirts aside before sinking down onto him, the soft leather of her bodice warming and creaking as she rode him—but no, that’s not right either, to imagine a hasty, furtive fuck in a corner. If he were lucky enough to take Tauriel to bed, he would go slowly, uncover her a mouthful at a time, worry her skin to goosebumps and her nipples to taut, aching points with his breath and his tongue and the edges of his teeth, until she moaned sweet pained moans for him, until she was on the edge of violence for him. And then… then. Kíli’s brow furrows as he tries to imagine what Tauriel might do to a man who kept her waiting, kept teasing the slick opening of her with his fingers but skating past her true center, nudging the blunt head of his cock against her, only to withdraw again and tease some more. He suspects bloodshed would ensue. The corner of his mouth quirks up.

 

 

“Shall I just come back later, then?”

Bilbo’s question is dry as dust, but Kíli leaps up like he’s been hit by lightning and hastily tucks himself away, and there’s a great deal of mockery from the company as they escape, and then in the cellars of course everyone has a comment about how will Kíli ever manage to fit himself _and_ his hard-on into the barrel, and by the time he’s shot in the leg by an Orc arrow, it’s very nearly a relief.

 

***

 

He genuinely expects never to see her again. She’ll just be one of those girls left behind in war, swept away by the tide of history. Every soldier, it seems, has one: a girl whose memory is thumbed over as often as an icon, so bathed in memory’s light that her very features have been erased. The thought makes Kíli feel sick, so he tries not to dwell upon it too much; Tauriel deserves more respect than to disappear into sainthood. Better that Kíli forget her completely than allow Tauriel—rough, animal, _living_ Tauriel—to flatten out into a false, storybook character in an old dwarf’s boring war stories. The Girl Who Saved Me, Laddie: a saga of self-absorption and what-ifs, in endless three-part harmony. Kíli won’t have any part of that, thank you. He’s getting on with his life, which, from the feel of his leg, won’t be very long anyway.

 

But then she turns up again, and is it Kíli’s fault that she does so in a literal haze of white, healing light? It is _not_. Looking up at her through the thick waves of his fever, hearing her chant and press on him in undulations, unsure if the arousal he’s feeling is real or entirely mental, unsure if she’s undressed or if that’s just the delirium being helpful, he decides, _fuck it_. Kíli doesn’t care if it makes him a cliché. He’s falling in love with her, and that’s that.

 

“I’m going to marry you,” he announces to her just as soon as his quintuple vision resolves itself down to regular old triple vision.

The Tauriels pause and smile quizzically at him, mortar and pestle in hands. “And how do you expect to achieve that?” they ask in gorgeous three-part harmony. “You haven’t asked me for my thoughts on the matter yet.”

“Oh, that’s coming,” he assures them. “Just as soon as you get down to one of you.” And then falls backwards onto the table again, dropped headfirst into a sleep that feels like being wrapped in fox furs, soft and red as Tauriel’s hair.

 

When he wakes up, she isn’t there. Just a disappointing amount of dwarf, and some human children who can’t seem to stop staring at him, as though they’ve never seen anything outside their species before. A better argument for cosmopolitan living, Kíli’s never seen. Get some diversity while they’re still young and impressionable, that’s the key—Kíli swings his leg over the edge of the table and down, and oh, _there’s_ the searing agony he was expecting, and suddenly so is Tauriel, at the door and then across the room like lightning, rushing to steady him. “Your leg! You’ll open it again. Whatever were you thinking?”

“I was thinking I hadn’t thrown up from pain in nearly long enough,” Kíli tells her, and then does, neatly avoiding her dress and instead splattering the family dog, who wags his tail and pants happily up at Kíli.

“You’re welcome,” Kíli tells him.

“You are not nearly as charming as you believe yourself to be,” Tauriel informs him sternly before turning to one of the children. “Get a wet cloth to clean that up.”

“Why, the dog’s doing admirably,” Kíli says, “Ow ow ow ow owwww,” because now Tauriel is bundling him back onto the table, none too gently, and scolding him all the while as she does: “Since you don’t seem to understand your situation, let me tell you that inside your leg? Your veins are like wet paper. And if you tear one of them open again, you will spill all your life’s blood over this nice clean table and I won’t weep at your funeral because I will be _too angry at you, you clot_ —”

“For dying without taking care of your needs as a woman,” Kíli says. “I know. Fair warning. I wouldn’t forgive me either.”

Tauriel looks at him with a mouth so stiff and flat that it could only be hiding a smile. And, just like that, he knows. He has her. He reaches up and strokes her face, and at his rough touch, her lips start to tremble and her eyes fill with tears. He instantly regrets breaking her composure.

“Aw, there, lassie,” he says to her. “Don’t cry. Please, no.” But of course that only makes her cry harder, and as he struggles to sit upright and take her into his arms, he feels the entirely new sensation, shockingly painful, of his heart stepping outside his own body and finding a home in someone else.

 

***

 

After that, it’s really only a matter of time. Being In Love, as it turns out, is nothing at all like pulling a barmaid into a cider closet, or having it off with your shooting partner against the tackroom wall. It is, instead, a Process horrifyingly akin to childbirth, a relentless biological metronome which _will_ happen, ready or not. Kíli is reminded, again and again, of his parents’ many excruciating Talks on the matter: “When two people are in love, they look at each other a great deal, and they blush and are silent, and often feel warm, and—” at this stage in the Talk, Kíli’s brain had typically shut down in order to protect him from hearing anything he could never unhear, but their parents were wily, and great believers in repetition, and some of it had gotten through despite his and Fíli’s best attempts to remain ignorant.

 

Now, trapped in a tiny kitchen with about three more dwarves and four more humans than he’d prefer be in the room, he realizes just how literal his parents were being. He and Tauriel truly can’t keep their eyes off each other, which sounds romantic in theory, but which in reality feels more like being strapped to a rampaging warg—you are going where the beast wishes to take you, regardless of dignity. Kíli keeps getting flicked about the head and ears by irritated dwarves trying to bring him back to the conversation at hand; he can’t blame the drugs, either, because A) men don’t have any worth taking and B) the constant damn _blushing_ is giving him away. He sees Tauriel and his body starts relentlessly jettisoning non-essential function in favor of preparation for the act which his cock, at least, seems convinced is imminent. Tauriel loses her train of thought and starts stammering, and he just goes bloody _mute_ , and then the fucking _blushing_ comes raging up from his neck to his ears, turning him as scarlet as a drunken aunt at Yule, which would be horribly embarrassing except that it’s happening to Tauriel, too.

 

“And on Tauriel… well, on Tauriel it’s so sweet,” confides Kíli to Fíli, who has given up on stopping Kíli’s monologue and is now thudding his head softly against the table in a vain attempt to knock himself out. Kíli would stop, really he would, but it’s so amusing to make his older brother cringe. Besides, what else are they going to talk about? It’s late in Bard’s house. Bofur and Oín have passed out underneath the table, Bard has sent his children to bed and gone to trade in illegals or foment revolution or just get stone drunk in a corridor somewhere, and Tauriel is up on the roof watching for orcs or sharpening her endless knives or doing Durin knows what. Kíli secretly hopes she is lying with an ear pressed to the roof shingles and can hear every word he’s been saying about her. He’s been saying them for the last two hours.

“Death,” moans Fíli. “Please, death.”

“You should have thought of that before you gave me tea,” Kíli tells him. “You know tea makes me talkative.”

“It was supposed to be soothing,” Fíli mutters into the tabletop.

“Well, there’s one lesson learnt for you,” Kíli says. “Come now. You’re pleased I’m not dead.”

In response, Fíli holds up a thumb and forefinger, just a fraction of an inch apart.

“Oh, surely more than that.”

The fraction grows slightly larger.

“That’s better,” Kíli says with satisfaction. After another moment of silence, he decides the hell with it and yells, “Tauriel!!” up at the ceiling.

Fíli’s head snaps up from the tabletop. “For Durin’s sake, shut it!!!” he hisses. “D’ye want to rouse the whole neighborhood?”

“No, just Tauriel. Come on, I know you’re listening up there,” Kíli sings to the ceiling. “Come down here and keep us company.” An ominous silence from the roof.

“I loathe you,” Fíli informs his brother, rising from the table and going to the window that gives access to the roof. “And if you wake Bard’s youngest, after I sang her three dirges to get her to settle, I will have your beardless, pretty head on a pike.”

“Duly warned,” Kíli tells him, and shoots his brother a sloppy salute. Fíli looks up to the skylight, muttering something about patience, and then hoists himself up and out into the star-filled night.

 

After a dignified pause, there’s a slight clatter of shingles, and Tauriel drops in a flurry of green skirts into the room.

“Fair protector,” Kíli greets her, stretching his arms out. “Come warm yourself at my lips.”

Tauriel looks at him in a manner meant to convey that she is not at all amused. He grins cheerily back at her. Sighing, she sets her bow and quiver down and comes to the table, flicking her skirts out of the way and sinking into the spot that Fíli has just vacated, just out of kissing range but well within hand-holding range. Because she is at least part troll, she lifts the bandage on his leg to peek at the wound there. He winces exaggeratedly, sucking his breath in over his bottom lip.

“Don’t whine. It’s unseemly.”

“But it hurts,” he whispers, his smile giving away the game.

“It would hurt less if it had hit bone. Be thankful it did not. Morgul poison works quicker through the marrow.”

“I am glad not to be dead for several reasons,” Kíli tells her, and although she studiously does not react, her rising color tells him the compliment has hit its mark. She has freckles, he notices, a tiny dusting right across her collarbone, a spot he wants to bite red—and, as he stares, it does darken, flushing prettily before his eyes as the color spreads up her throat and down into her dress. He’s suddenly, painfully, dizzyingly hard, the kind of hard that makes his temples throb. He takes her hand, and she slides closer towards him on the bench, just a hairs-breadth away from kissing range. Secret-telling range.

“There you are,” he whispers to her.

“Here I am.”

“I was beginning to think you’d never come down from that roof.”

She smiles at that. “I can feel,” she begins, and then collapses into giggles.

“What?” he says, already mortified and preparing to launch into an aria of apologies, when she says, still heaving with mirth: “I can feel Oín _breathing_ on my ankle!”

He can’t help it. He loses it, completely, and the two of them sway with helpless laughter until the tears come.

“This house,” he wails, throwing his head back and thudding it slightly. “This _house!_ ”

“I know!” Tauriel is racked with laughter, wiping away tears as she rocks.

“Every moment I think we get alone there’s a bleedin’ kid!”

“The children I don’t mind so much as _your_ lot! I’ve never seen such dampers!”

“Oh Gods yes, I want to bell Bofur like a cat!”

“Yes! He could be given to families with too many children, as a way of keeping them from getting more!”

Kíli stills his face to mock-seriousness. “Do you know, I’d never considered the possibility of giving him away before. D’ye think anyone would take him?”

“Oh heavens, no,” says Tauriel, mopping under her eyes with her sleeve. “We shall have to carry on and suffer.”

Kíli looks at her speculatively. “Will we now,” he says quietly, reaching out and tracing the line of her braid, following his fingers with his eyes as he gently coaxes a few soft strands from their fastenings. Slowly letting his hand drop, he deliberately brushes his roughened fingertips against the shell of her ear, and watches as her eyelids slide shut, a shiver of pleasure running through her frame at the touch. He could please this woman, he knows it. Knows it in the same belly-deep way he knows it when he’s lined up a shot right, that moment of utter clarity when the whole world pauses and draws in its breath.

“You are down to one of you, now, by the way,” he says, and she looks puzzled.

“What?”

“I said I was going to marry you once you resolved yourself into one person,” he said. “Not that three of you were not delightful, while it lasted, and a strong argument for polygamy, by the way. But the triple vision’s all better now—” and here, over Tauriel’s scandalized sputtering, he knocks his knuckles against his head to prove it—“and so I have to say, you’re running out of excuses, my dear lady.”

Tauriel composes herself with some effort. “Oh, well then,” she says with regal sarcasm, “Clearly, when such urgent petition is sought, formality must yield. Shall we marry in the onion closet? Or perhaps the boot alcove?”

“The boot alcove does offer more standing room for guests,” Kíli concedes. “But I do so love onions.”

“You must not get kissed very often,” Tauriel says.

“Oh, my lady, you have no idea,” says Kíli, giving her his most roguish grin.

“Oh, do I not!” Tauriel exclaims. “Well then, you must educate me. Are the dwarven girls lining up down the mine shaft? Shall I have to best some fearsome ladies in single combat?”

“Oh no, not single combat,” Kíli demurs. “You may of course challenge my childhood playmate Agna to a drinking match, or to throwing hammers. Honestly, though, I think you’re better off with the sword.”

“Oh, so now we are down from the teeming hordes to a single playfellow?” Tauriel leans forward, her eyes sparkling merrily. “Tell me of her. Did she tug your braids in school?”

“Oh, much worse. She tugged my brother’s braids.”

“That hussy!”

“I know, when I was so clearly the better catch.” Kíli puffs out his chest a little, to make her laugh.

“When did things change?” Tauriel rests her elbow on the table and her head in the cup of her hand. They’re turned in towards each other now, close as an old married couple whispering late at night. Under the eaves, it’s cozy and warm.

“When we were teenagers,” Kíli says. “Fíli had no real interest in archery, I mean he is a very fine warrior, but he inherited my father’s love of the broadsword, not of the bow.”

“And Agna liked your… archery,” Tauriel says, an eyebrow rising.

“Not at all. But she liked me kissing her in the bow closet.”

“I rescind my statement. You are the hussy in this story.”

“You’ll be glad of the practice when you finally convince me to kiss you.”

“When _I_ convince _you!_ ”

“Yes, I’m really not sure about this whole elvish thing. You’re so tall.”

“I’m too tall! Has it ever occurred to you that you are quite short?”

“Nonsense,” says Kíli, “Everyone knows that good things come in small pack—oh Gods, I’ve just realized what I’ve said. Nevermind, nevermind, no one knows that saying, ignore me, I’m woozy from the poison, I don’t know what I’m saying, it’s truly massive—” he hushes abruptly as Tauriel lays one cool finger softly across his lips.

“Shush,” she tells him. “You’ll ruin what little mystery you have.”

“I told you, it’s not little—”

_“Hush.”_ She smiles at him. He smiles back, underneath her finger. And, just as the magnetism between them is finally finally _finally_ bringing her into kissing range, she stills.

“Kíli,” she says with extraordinary dignity, “One of your sleeping friends has just rolled over, and embraced my ankle.”

“What?” says Kíli, struggling to sit up and then peek over the edge of the table. It’s true. Oín has turned over his sleep, curling up like a large and ugly baby, and has Tauriel’s foot and ankle wrapped in his arms. He appears to be nuzzling the foot slightly. The sight is… contraceptive.

Kíli sits back up and looks apologetically at Tauriel. “There really is no way to retrieve the moment, is there.”

Tauriel is rising from the table, gingerly extracting her foot, which seems to require some effort. She looks at him.

“Right, I thought not,” he said. “I’ll kill him straightaway, then, it’ll just take half a tick, where’s my sword—ah, damn,” he says, as he spies it sitting on the other side of the room. “I don’t suppose you’d be a dear and fetch it for me so I can use it to ruthlessly murder one of my oldest and dearest friends in cold blood and never have a moment’s regret over the matter, would you?”

“No,” she says. “But how’s this, I will go downstairs and rest on the carpet outside the girls’ room, thus guarding the privy entrance and keeping us all from being slaughtered by Orcs in our sleep.”

“Orc or mine own hand, I promise you, Oín will not survive for this.” Kíli calls to her as she starts down the stairs; she smiles to him briefly, and then is gone. He waits a few moments before raising his good leg and letting it thud down on the table surface. A slight chuckle from below confirms what he already knows. “Oín, I _will_ kill you.”

“Oh, stop, you will not,” says Bofur from below, just as Oín pipes up with, “It was either snuggle her ankle or listen to you try and fail to make love to her for another three hours. I prefer a fast death over a slow.”

Kíli rolls over and lets his head drop down over the edge. “I was making progress!” he hisses, and Bofur rolls his eyes eloquently.

“You were _not_ ,” he says. “There were at least three points in that conversation at which you should have kissed her, except that you became all womanish about it.”

“Aye, laddie,” Oín concurs, without even opening his eyes. “You wouldn’t know courtship if it bit ye in the arse.”

“There were three points?” Kíli says.

“Five by my count,” Oín says.

“Between three and five,” Bofur tells him, nodding sagely. “You just think upon those numbers, while I lie here and compose an elegy for the line of Oakenshield.”

“Thank Durin his brother has a better tongue,” Oín says.

“Aye,” Bofur agrees. “If only he would use it.”

Kíli’s jaw drops in indignation. “My brother! Who’s hardly ever spoken to a woman!”

“True,” Oín says placidly. “It is rather difficult to determine the boy’s level of skill with the ladies when he refuses to interact with them.”

“Still,” Bofur says, “Better silence than to go rattling on like a fishwife. We did you a favor, lad. Stopped the bleeding, as it were.”

“You are all torturers,” Kíli says, and rolls back onto the table, there to stare up at the rafters and wonder where, exactly, his three (to five) chances to kiss Tauriel had been.

 

***

 

 

The next morning is, if possible, worse. It’s Durin’s Day, and the dwarves who’ve stayed with Kíli are in an apoplexy of worry over the dwarves who went to the mountain, worry which turns them talkative. Oín in particular latches onto Kíli’s ear, bending it with a ferocious stream of reminiscences about life under the mountain. Kíli was carried out of the mountain in Dís’s arms, far too young to remember anything of life before Smaug, much less a paradise like Oín is describing, overflowing with gold and gems and milk and honey, back in the good old days when men were men and the women were also men… Fíli, who was barely able to walk when the dwarves fled Erebor, gives Kíli a speaking glance over breakfast. Later, just out of Oín’s hearing, he mutters to Kíli, “How many lies do you think it takes to forge one single good old day?” and Kíli chokes on a guffaw. Sneaking a peek at Tauriel, who is monitoring Laketown from the dormer window, he sees that she has also caught his brother’s comment—those strange elvish ears are sharp as anything, and her expression is wicked.

“Tauriel,” he whines, “I have been on this table for a year, possibly longer. I long to see the sunlight. It’s not natural for a dwarf to be this pale.”

“We live _underground,”_ Fíli begins, before Kíli elbows him sharply.

“Let me stand and join you at the window? These nice people would like their breakfast table back, I’m sure.”

She turns to study him, and the sun lines her in blinding gold. She is smiling. He thinks that if he could have just this moment, just this one moment forever, he would be truly content.

“All right,” she says. “But don’t twist the leg.”

“Aye aye,” Kíli says, and with Fíli’s help, is bundled off the table and maneuvered to the window, where there is much fussing and fetching of pillows and tea by Bard’s youngest, who seems to have the dwarves’ size confused with their age, and is under the impression that they are very young and vulnerable. Three times she has had to be dissuaded from putting a frilly bonnet on Bofur, until he finally relented and let her. He’s still wearing it, singing a smelting chanty as he washes the dishes and flips them, one by one, across the kitchen, where they land in neat stacks on the far countertop. Bard’s eldest is watching Bofur work with awe. “You can come and wash dishes _anytime,_ ” she tells him, and Bofur laughs and works her name into the next round of the chanty.

“I wouldn’t blame you, just so you’re aware,” Kíli says to Tauriel in a low undertone, “If you gave in to your raw animal desires and forsook me for Bofur. His singing does tend to have that effect.”

“Does it now,” Tauriel says. “I had not noticed.”

“Is it the bonnet? I told him he’s really better in lilac.”

“It is not the bonnet,” Tauriel says.

“The womanish work, then? For I must confess, I frequently like nothing better than a good scrub of some dishes. It soothes the mind, and gets the dirt out from under your nails.”

Tauriel looks at him.

“No? Then I’m lost. Bofur is a fine dwarf, from a good family, a skilled musician, with a truly spectacular mustache…” Kíli trails off. “Come to think of it, why haven’t I married him myself?”

Tauriel nearly hiccups with the effort to restrain her laughter. Kíli continues.

“No, really, I’ve half talked myself into it here. I’m sure he’d treat me kindly. Tell you what, I’ll flip you for him.” Kíli sets down his teacup, digs a coin out of his pocket and balances it on his thumbnail, looking up at her slyly through his lashes. “Unless you should object, of course.”

“Oh no, by all means,” Tauriel says magnanimously. “Throw me over for Bofur, discard all our fine plans and marry him in the onion closet, see if I care.”

Kíli returns the coin to his pocket, grinning smugly. “Ahhh, so you do care.”

“Mmm,” Tauriel says, her eyes tracking the movements of the family around the kitchen as Bard readies his daughters for school. “I deny everything.”

“Deny all you wish, you desire this body and everything to do with it,” says Kíli, his tone light, his eyes on his tea and not on Tauriel, so it catches him rather by surprise when her voice floats into his ear, pitched low and only for him.

“And if I did?”

Kíli freezes mid-sip, a mouthful of tea suddenly an urgent barrier to his breath. He negotiates the swallow very, very carefully. Tauriel watches him as he sets down his teacup and slides off the window seat before offering her his hand.

“Then I think you should come with me,” he says.

 

***

 

“You must be joking,” says Tauriel once the door is safely closed behind them. “Surely all dwarves aren’t this literal.”

“I know,” Kíli says, “Believe me, I know, it’s horrible—”

“It is _an onion closet!”_

“I know!!” Kíli hisses, his hands out to mollify Tauriel, who is beginning to look a little hysterical around the edges. “Believe me, I know, it’s terrible, but it’s the only way we are going to get any privacy in this damned house—oh, if you could see _the expression on your face,_ ” he says, and Tauriel makes it as far as, “I fail to see how this is funny,” before she breaks, and for the second time in as many days they are lost to violent, voiceless laughter, hands locked over their mouths so they don’t draw the attention of curious children and dwarves, clinging to each other so they don’t fall over the many onion crates, and it’s then that Kíli, finally, sees his chance. He takes Tauriel’s hand, pulls it gently away from her mouth and draws her down for a kiss, taking her face in his hands as he deepens the contact, smoothing his thumbs down her temples as he pulls away. They blink at each other, Kíli taking in her bright eyes and the pulse he can see thudding in her throat as he traces her cheekbones and cups her jaw.

Tauriel swallows. “I hope you don’t really think,” she says, her voice husky and crackling around the thumb Kíli is gently running over her upper lip, “That I am going to marry you today, right here, in this closet.”

“Oh Gods no,” Kíli says. “We’d never get the invitations lettered in time. I’m simply hoping for a yes.”

“On the basis of one kiss!” Tauriel exclaims.

“One of my better qualities, you’ll find,” Kíli says, eyes flickering over every detail of Tauriel’s face, “Is that I know a request for another kiss when I hear one.” This time, his approach is carefully judged to brush over the spot he discovered before, the one on her upper lip that made her voice wobble. Once he finds it, the tiny quiver running through Tauriel’s otherwise rigid frame encourages him, and he nudges at her, coaxing her, asking her a question with his warmth and his lips and his hands. Tauriel holds still, frozen as a glacier for several aching seconds before she melts, magnificently, answering him with a truly thrilling moan as she slams to her knees, evening their heights and yanking him towards her by the shirtfront as she opens her mouth, devouring him greedily, hungrily, like the animal he knew she was all along. His short and stubby fingers are all knotted and tangled up in her hair, her long cool clever fingers are sliding up under his shirt and _Durin,_ she is _nippy_ with those sharp elfish teeth. Kíli’s decided that he likes nippy. He doesn’t even want his tongue back, she can keep it forever, keep playing this dangerous game where she captures his tongue, then runs it sloowwwly through her mouth, letting him feel the razerous edges of her teeth and the absolutely insane lushness of her lips at the same time.

“My lady,” he says, dizzily, and she pants into his mouth and impatiently tries to kiss him again and _oh Gods he actually has to hold her back using her hair this is going to be **so much fun** ,_ “Tauriel.”

_“Yes?”_ she says, sounding murderous.

“We are going to need a bed.”

“Mmm.”

“And another bandage.”

“A bandage, why—” and then she looks downward, and sees the blood that’s pooling at his heel, and leaps up. “Your leg, it’s reopened!”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you say something!”

Kíli closes his eyes, fighting the dizziness that is, he now has to admit, _not the fun kind of blood loss._ At least mainly. “I had better things to do with my tongue,” he says.

“Oh, you stubborn, stupid…”

It’s the last thing Kíli hears for a little while.

 

 

 

 

When he wakes up, he’s back on the kitchen table. Tied to it, to be precise. It is late at night, his leg is freshly bound, and Tauriel is nowhere to be seen. Bofur is looking at him with ill-concealed amusement. Oín is lighting a pipe. Bard has his arms crossed. Fíli is just staring.

_“The onion closet?!?”_ Bofur leads with.

“Uh,” says Kíli.

“My onion closet,” Bard says.

“Sorry?” Kíli tries.

“Oh no,” Bard says, waving a hand in the air. “I’d’ve tried it too. I just might not have picked, you know, _a place where we store odorous vegetables_.”

“An onion is technically a fruit,” Fíli says, and Oín pauses from his pipe-lighting to stare across the table at Fíli with deep incredulity.

“You should thank the gods you’re handsome, boy,” he finally says.

“Where is Tauriel?” Kíli asks. A group chuckle ensues.

“Oh, her? You’ve pissed her off good and proper, laddie,” Oín tells him. “She’s gone off to find some really evil herbs to stuff in your leg. Something that will sting like a fistful of scorpions, I think it was.”

“And she’s not talking to him, remember to tell him that,” says Bofur.

“Ah yes. She was very sure to mention that she wasn’t going to be talking to you.”

“That she was.”

“Mentioned it two or three times, as I recall.”

They are all grinning at him.

“Congratulations, boy,” says Bofur, reaching out and slapping him on the shoulder.

“Indeed,” says Oín, and the rest make general sounds of approbation.

Kíli is genuinely confused. “Congratulations? What for?”

“Why, you’ve won her!” Bofur says. “Surely you don’t think a woman like that would throw a fit, tie you to a table, scream at everyone in the house that she’s never speaking to you again, and even now be hunting down a whole bouquet of, what was it, Devil’s Pestilence?”

“Aye, Devil’s Pestilence.”

“Right, of Devil’s Pestilence, which I might add is not an easy weed to find in an aquatic environment, to torture you with, if she didn’t care for you?”

“It’s obvious, laddie,” Oín says.

“Painfully,” says Bard.

“Whatever you were giving her down there in the onion closet,” Oín continues, and at Fíli’s look hastily adds, “And I dinnae want to know what that was—”

“Well, she certainly seemed to resent the interruption,” Bofur points out.

“We are talking about _my brother,_ ” says Fíli.

“All right, all right, Kíli will give us all the details later,” says Bofur.

“I will _not,_ ” says Kíli.

“Alreet, Kíli will give us a _few_ of the details later,” Oín says, sucking his pipe—at Kíli’s glare, he says, “What? Just enough to make us jealous.”

“You’re jealous enough,” says Kíli. “Or don’t you think I remember that nonsense with her foot?”

“What nonsense with her foot?” says Fíli.

“These two clowns,” Kíli says, ignoring Bofur and Oín’s hurt expressions, “Have been acting as dampers—”

“Helpers!”

“ _Dampers,_ of the worst possible variety, ever since I began courting Tauriel.”

“Ah, so _that’s_ what I saw in my onion closet,” says Bard. “Funny, I don’t recall courting involving nearly so much blood.”

“The blood was an accident,” Kíli says.

“I should hope,” says Fíli. “Brother, you _will_ refuse if she takes out her blades in the bedchamber?”

The entire table stares at Fíli until he hunches defensively. “What! Some people have unusual tastes!”

Oín lets out a small puff of smoke. “I’ve changed me mind,” he says decisively, pointing with the stem of his pipe at Fíli. “Don’t ever speak to girls. It’s better for everyone.”

“ _What_ have I been saying all along?!” Kíli says.

“I still don’t understand about the foot,” Fíli protests.

“We were simply doing him a favor,” Oín says.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about that, and I really don’t think you were,” Kíli retorts.

Oín snorts. “And what would you know about courting? By your own admission you’ve only been with the one girl, what was her name?”

“Agna,” Bofur helpfully supplies. “Of the Feldspar clan, I believe. I want to say her father once split a geode the size of a beer keg with a single hatchet blow.”

“Wait, you had relations with Agna?” Fíli says. “Our Agna?”

“I believe that would be _my_ Agna,” Kíli says, smirking.

“…Noooo, that would be _our_ Agna,” Fíli says slowly, and Kíli turns a bit pale.

“So, that’s a new thing I’ve learnt about dwarven culture today,” says Bard. “How big are your mining communities, exactly?”

“Large enough that _that_ should never happen, laddie,” Oín says philosophically, drawing on his pipe.

“It was a purple geode, as I recall,” Bofur muses out loud. “Shot through with yellow streaks.”

“Speaking of yellow streaks, have you got any hiding spaces within this house for when the lady Tauriel comes back?” Kíli asks Bard. “I don’t much relish the sound of—what was that weed again?”

“Devil’s Pestilence, and ye’ll lie there and take it like a man,” Oín informs Kíli sternly. “With no whimpering.”

“Oh I beg to differ,” says Kíli. “There _will_ be whimpering.”

“You’ve never heard him with a cold,” says Fíli to everyone. “It’s like listening to a thousand old women with arthritis.”

“Worse,” says Bofur. “You can always tune a woman out.”

“How would you know?” asks Kíli. “Have you ever had one?”

“See if I ever help _you_ with a courtship again,” Bofur tells him.

“You haven’t helped me with _this one now!!”_

“Nevertheless,” says Oín. “Ye must endure, lest she think you less than a man.”

“I’m a dwarf, so I’m fine with that,” says Kíli. “Bard, do you think she’s noticed? I know I’m tall for a dwarf.”

“I think she knows, yes,” says Bard.

“What she sees in ye is another matter entirely,” grumps Oín.

“I think she saw plenty in the onion closet,” says Bofur, and Bard drops his face into his hand.

“It didn’t go that far,” Kíli assures him, and at Fíli’s snort hastens to explain: “I didn’t _mean it that way_ I’ll have you know it’s quite long for—”

“Enough,” says Bard, hand still covering his face but not quite concealing his smile. “I cannot believe I allow my children to talk to any of you, you’re all terrible influences, this time has been a nightmare and I hate you all. Congratulations, Kíli. I’ll find us all some wine.”

And while they absolutely refuse to untie him, claiming to value their lives, they do allow him to participate in a toast.

 

To his future marital bliss.

 

 

 

The next morning, a dragon happens.


	2. A Game Of Soldiers

Kíli isn’t even sure what’s happening for the first few seconds after he awakens—he’s groggy from wine and blood loss, and there’s screaming, and hands untying him, and just as his brain finally processes the word DRAGON, _the entire fucking roof of the house goes_ , blown off in a single blast of flame.

“THAT WAS A DRAGON!” he finds himself screaming, nonsensically, at the now open sky, as if the subject were up for debate, as if it could possibly have been an eagle or an albatross or a particularly determined goldfish, and it’s a measure of how scared Fíli is that he doesn’t mock Kíli, just says “Yes it is,” as he shoves Kíli’s bow and quiver into his arms and then shoves Kíli off the table into a wheelbarrow.

“Where is Tauriel? Where’s Bofur and Oín? Who was on the roof? Where are the children?” Kíli sputters, trying to climb out of the wheelbarrow as questions—specifically _where is Tauriel where is she where is she where is she_ —drop into his mind like burning brands.

“Don’t know,” says Fíli, pushing him back down into the wheelbarrow with the full force of his stout swordsman’s frame, “But if she were on the roof, she would’ve jumped into the water, which is where we need to be.” With that, he heaves Kíli’s wheelbarrow down the stairs, where he finds himself in the middle of a mob of panicked children and dwarves. Bard’s youngest sees him and flings herself into his arms, sobbing “Where’s Da, where’s Da?” Kíli looks frantically about. No one in the darkened hallway is over four feet tall.   
“Bofur,” he hisses over the child’s head as she sobs, “Where’s Tauriel?”

“I don’t know,” Bofur tells him, “But she took last watch on the roof.”

“Let’s get these children into a boat and get them aimed towards shore,” Fíli says grimly, setting off a round of howls from the girls that they won’t go without their Da and Bain, which triggers yet another wave of panic as the dwarves realize there is one child unaccounted for. Bard’s eldest daughter confirms that the boy has taken the black arrow and gone to shoot down the dragon, and with that Fíli snaps into command: “Right, we are evacuating this city _right now_. Oín, get the boat out, Bofur, get these girls wrapped up warmly and in that boat along with Kíli and yourself. Girls, I am _going_ to find your Da and brother, but in return you have to watch my little brother for me. You have to get him to shore and watch his leg like the lady Tauriel did. _Can you do that for me?”_

Sniffling, the girls nod, the younger detaching from Kíli and wiping her nose on her sleeve.

“Good girls. Bofur, _get them in that boat_.” Fíli turns to leave and Kíli lunges from the barrow to grab his arm.

“No, I can still fight—”

Fíli gives Kíli a Look. “And what am I to tell Dís when she returns to the mountain to find only one son? What am I to tell Thorin, who loves you as his own?”

Kíli opens his mouth to protest again, but then Fíli steps much closer. In an undertone none but Kíli can hear, he says, “You are the only archer in our group. What if you approach shore and that pack of orcs is waiting there? You would let these lasses see _close_ combat?”

Kíli closes his mouth again. Fíli nods, claps him on the shoulder, and disappears into the chaos outside. A heavy thudding on the trapdoor near the fish cooler signals Oín’s presence underneath the stilted house, and Kíli helps Bofur to soothe and lower the girls through the trapdoor into the small rowing coracle below. Then Bofur helps Kíli into the boat, where the youngest has already made a convenient nest for his leg out of her blankets.

“I’m not cold,” she says bravely, although it is a bitterly cold night, lashed by high winds that are making the dragonfire even worse, blowing up great curling flags of it and peeling hundreds of burning shingles off the roofs of Laketown. As Bofur guides them through the increasingly blocked waterways, it becomes quickly apparent to Kíli that the real danger lies in those floating brands, each the size of a large man’s palm and sticky with melting, burning tar. “Here, girls,” he says, thinking fast, “Let’s make a tent of blankets for you to lie under while we row. Sigrid, do you think you can help me?” The obliging, clever girl understands his goal immediately, spreading the widest blanket over the middle seat and then coaxing her sister to slip underneath it with her. As a muffled lullaby comes drifting from beneath the blanket, Kíli and Oín take palmfuls of water and dampen the thick woolen fabric, hoping to fireproof it at least slightly, lest a falling brand strike the boat. Of course, should the dragon decide to pass over them, no amount of fabric at all will save them; Kíli keeps an ear cocked toward the sky, following Smaug’s path of destruction by the loud chorus of screams that ripple in advance of the dragon like waves at the prow of a ship. “If that thing comes near us,” he whispers to Bofur, “We are going to have to flip the boat.”

“Oh aye,” says Bofur, neatly avoiding a falling length of burning clothesline. “Just do me a favor, work out which way you’re going to tip the boat in advance, so you and Oín aren’t working at cross-purposes?”

It’s a good point, and Kíli spends the next three minutes in frantic signed consultation with Oín, whose hearing is very poor even when there’s not a nineteen-ton dragon about. And Gods, does Smaug like to hear himself talk—it’s all “fear my wrath” this and “now you shall burn” that, ludicrous boasting which in dwarven culture would be considered very poor form indeed. When Smaug rumbles something about “I am… fire… I am … death”, Bofur rolls his eyes so extravagently that Kíli nearly laughs, then promptly feels horrible about nearly laughing when so many people are dying. At least every moment that Smaug talks is a moment he is not breathing fire. Kíli fervently hopes the dragon will be long-winded enough to allow Bard’s son to get the black arrow to the windlass—and furthermore, that Bard’s son turns out to be a decent shot. And then, pelting across the rooftops at full speed, an elf-shaped blur appears, leapfrogging across the waterways in a light-footed whirlwind of long hair and skirts, dropping like a feather to land delicately in the prow of the boat.

“Legolas,” Oín greets the elf without even turning round, “Good of you to join us.”

“Dwarf,” says Legolas.

“ _Where is Tauriel?_ ” asks Kíli.

“She is helping Bard’s son get the black arrow to his father,” says Legolas. “Last I saw her, she was still well. Behind you!” They all duck to avoid a massive plume of cinders and flame from a disintegrating shack behind them; Legolas spends several seconds helping them pat out the sparks which have caught on the girls’ blanket, then whips out his bow and unloads three arrows in swift succession into a dark form at the crest of a nearby roof. The form tumbles head over heels into a flaming mat of flotsam and sinks beneath the water’s surface. Legolas’s jaw unclenches a very slight amount.

“Orc,” he explains to the dumbstruck dwarves. “There’s been a pack hunting about the town for you since you arrived. Tauriel and I have been taking turns thinning them out.”

Kíli feels his regard for Tauriel magnifying yet another hundred times. It is like climbing a mountain in the Iron Hills—every time you think you have reached the top, you realize you have reached only another plateau, and there is another entire mountain ahead. “I thought she was just taking watches on the roof,” he says, stupidly.

Legolas regards him. “That is what ‘taking watch’ means,” he says at length, and Kíli feels his face heat up.

“Leaving aside for a moment our resident lovebirds,” Bofur hisses, “Could someone please give me some bloody directions? I can’t row _and_ keep a watch for falling timbers _and_ find my way out of a burning aquatic city _and_ sort out Kíli’s love life all at the same time! No offense, Kíli.”

“None taken,” says Kíli, grateful for the distraction, as Legolas and Oín promptly get in an argument about what “left” means when giving directions to a rower who is facing backwards. As Oín stoutly (and incorrectly) maintains that dwarves invented maritime navigation and Legolas goes apoplectic with indignation, Kíli begins pointing in the direction the boat needs to go, more frantically when the direction change is urgent due to falling debris. Legolas snatches burning roof tiles out of the air with his arrow tips while continuing his diplomatic exchange with Oín:

“You lot live _underground!_ Your ancestors wouldn’t know a star chart if it bit—”

“ _My ancestors_ were busy building the first lock and dam in Middle Earth while yours were fannying about with woodwind instruments!”

_“Will ye both shut it!!!”_ Bofur hisses. “In case you’d forgotten, there are children on this boat who need not hear ye recreating the Sack of Doriath!”

“Which we won,” Oín points out.

“Oh, shut up,” Legolas says, but settles into baleful silence at the prow of the boat.

Bofur, looking increasingly murderous, rows onward, and somehow they get out of Laketown in one piece before Smaug, rearing up to full, terrifying height, razes the entire block of buildings that had included Bard’s house. Kíli tugs the tent-blanket towards the bottom of the boat, thinking to shield the girls from the sight of their home burning, but drops the blanket edge as he is distracted by the sight of Smaug’s ridged back, sloping deliberately towards the damaged and tilting watchtower, where there are two— _no, three_ —dark silhouettes scrambling desperately for hold. Kíli feels his heart clog his throat, as Smaug rears back, filling his throat to deliver the killer breath—then staggers, rears back, flaps his great wings and churns his ponderous weight up into the sky. All eyes in the small boat follow him upwards, like soldiers watching the slow and terrible parabola of a catapult hoisting its deadly payload. When Smaug clears the height of the mountainous horizon, he slows; against the moon’s gigantic orb, they can all see the line, splinter-fine, of a black arrow jutting from his chest. For a heartstopping moment, the dragon is still—then, like a massive tree being felled, he tilts backwards slowly, majestically, and falls into the lake. There is a pluming crash as water closes over the body of the reptile. After a few minutes of watchful silence, some enterprising Laketowner begins ringing the town’s clock bells, and the sound triggers a ragged wave of cheers, rising from the burning village like cinders. Bofur pulls the oars in so he can reach out and pat Kíli on the shoulder.

“There, lad,” he says softly. “If anyone could have survived that, it’d be your lass. I’ve never seen another so light-footed.”

 

Kíli has no answer to that, and a grim silence falls over the party for the next twenty minutes, until a rind of land, black as the tar in the bottom of a treacle barrel, comes near. It’s nasty, peaty wetland, and when they finally make landfall (around two in the morning), it takes them the better part of an hour to find ground substantial enough to pull the boat out. The children are dazed with trauma, and it’s wordlessly agreed that they’ll make camp for the night before returning to Laketown. Bofur and Oín turn the boat on its side against the wind, propping it on sunken reeds, and Kíli helps the girls spread their blankets beneath it before building a small fire. The girls, ignorant of the dangers of marshes, fall asleep instantly; Legolas takes first watch so Oín, Bofur and Kíli can try to rest, but they’ve all seen too much fighting in swamps to be able to relax, and every rattle of wind through reeds sends them spasming upright to squint into the darkness. It is a horrible night, but it passes, as all nights do, and when the dawn finally blues up the sky, even Bofur and Oín have managed to grab a few minutes of sleep.

 

Kíli has not. From the moment Laketown becomes visible again in the morning, he can’t stop staring at it, pacing back and forth, fretting over his brother and Tauriel. Twice he stumbles into the cinders of the campfire and sends a plume of ash and sparks over the others, until finally Bofur takes him by the arm and firmly tells him to stop upsetting the girls afresh. The other dwarves quickly and efficiently strip the campsite and are readying the boat when they hear the first “Hallo” echoing faintly across the water. It’s a boat full of Laketowners, and there are sixteen more such boats and rafts stretched across the lake’s surface, trailing back to the damaged pilings and half-burnt structures of Laketown. The dwarves squint into the fog, but only Legolas’s sharp eyes can discern the individuals in the fifth raft from the front.

“It’s Fíli and Tauriel,” he says. “Go tell the girls Bard and his son are with them.”

Bofur goes to tell the children, which is good, because Kíli seems to have lost the use of his legs. He sinks to his knees at the marshy edge of the swamp and watches the boats coming in, one hand locked over his mouth and the other digging into his thigh, barely able to control his breathing, his wild urge to cry. Strange feeling, watching your own heart return to you across the water.

 

***

 

Evacuating a city, as it turns out, is a messy process. The first three boats are crammed with traumatized children who must be lifted out of the boats and minded carefully lest they wander off into the swamp. The next boat, inexplicably, is full of nothing but gold and Alfrid. There’s plenty of room for other people to have gotten on board, but no, it’s just… Alfrid. And a lot of gold. The dwarves glare at him, and he glares right back. “Your bloody bargeman is on the next boat,” he tells them. “Nearly got us all killed.”

“I doubt that extremely,” Legolas says, looming as only an elf in a crowd of children, dwarves and Alfrid can loom.

Alfrid looks as though he is going to start something, thinks better of it, then stomps off to moor his very heavy and valuable boat to a thin sapling in a stiff current. Nobody stops him. Finally, after an agonizingly long wait, the boat with Fíli, Tauriel, Bard and his son pulls up to the shore; they are seated in the back of the boat with a dozen villagers in front of them, and Kíli struggles to hide his impatience as several members of the town elder council are helped from the boat and sit on the shore, complaining of gout and asking the small children to bring them wine.

 

Bard and his son hop off the boat eagerly, but Tauriel, strangely, does not. Her face is artificially still; her gaze, when she briefly meets Kíli’s eyes, is impassive. He is baffled and hurt—for a moment he wonders if she thinks him a coward for leaving Laketown as it burned—and then he hears the snapping of many reeds at the crest of the hill behind him, and an alarum of horns announcing the arrival of her king.

Kíli’s eyes close. _Fucking_ Thranduil. Of _course_ he would ride down from Mirkwood to loftily survey the smoking rubble. He probably has this sort of thing penciled into his daily agenda: “Find a group of people more miserable than self, preferably refugees. Fuck with them, 11-noon.”

Kíli watches as the elven king reaches out and beckons to Tauriel and Legolas, who walk up the hill and spend some time in consultation with him. Though it is too far and the wind whips too high for words to carry, Tauriel’s shuttered, hunted expression speaks loud and clear to Kíli; she is apparently not in Thranduil’s good graces at the moment. At one point, Legolas turns and gestures towards the ruins of Laketown, probably making a case for aid to the survivors; judging by Thranduil’s bored expression, he’s more likely thinking about lunch. For a brief moment, Kíli is overcome, drowning in a tidal wave of adolescent grievance. How dare kings, and politics, and a bloody dragon, and boats full of whining refugees get in the way of a love so obviously pure, and true, and good? Everyone should be able to see that he and Tauriel are simply _correct_ , and furthermore that they ought to be left in peace for the next two hundred years or so. The feeling is made even worse by his recognition of its selfishness. It seems that being in love with someone as decent as Tauriel means that Kíli can’t even have a good temper tantrum when he wants to. And Gods, he really wants to.

 

But then Tauriel turns, and looks over her shoulder down the hillside, and he knows just from the look on her face that she’s just gotten her marching orders—knows what those two horses Legolas is leading over are for—knows she won’t have time to say good-bye. And with that knowledge comes a sudden, unexpected surge of strength. _Fuck **this** for a game of soldiers_ , thinks Kíli. He can’t help being in love with a captain in Thranduil’s guard, but he can certainly avoid adding to her misery. He squares his shoulders and stands up straight, willing himself to be steady. Willing himself to be the man she needs. When her eyes lock on his, the jolt of feeling is so strong—even over thirty yards of swamp heather—that he nearly falters. Instead, he smiles wide, and slowly, deliberately, raises his hand. _Goodbye,_ he mouths.

She does not react nor cry out, but everything in her face shows that she wants to. Legolas leads a horse to her, places the reins in her hands, says something whipped away by the winds. She is still looking at Kíli.

_It’s all right,_ mouths Kíli. _Go_. Lest his meaning be lost, he drops his hands and makes a shooing motion, grinning easily at her. At this, she smiles, but he can see that she is trying not to cry. He has to let her go before Thranduil sees.

_See you again_ , he mouths, and winks at her, turning and sauntering away. It takes every ounce of strength he has not to look back at the hilltop until she is gone.

 

 

It’s not even sunset of that day before he’s written the first letter.


	3. A Dictionary of War

_Lovliest and most warlike lady,_ Kíli writes, fingers cramping up on the quill he hasn’t held, except to occasionally sign his name, since school. _Just so we’re clear, I have heard the old “deployed to battle orcs in the northern borderlands” excuse before, and am not fooled one bit by your clever ploy._ He weighs the possible addition of an apostrophe to “your” and decides against it. Bofur always says the balance of probability is against apostrophes. _Far be it from me to deny you the pleasures of orc decapitation; muddy battlefields; marching. But I must warn you, further kisses are inevitable,_ he continues, rain dripping off the tarp over his head and dampening the page somewhat. The smoke of a cooking fire curls towards him in the sodden air, and he taps his teeth with the quill feather before grinning and jotting down his final sentence. _I am told that even in the northern borderlands, onion closets may be found._ He doesn’t sign his name (because unlike Oín or Thorin or even Fíli, Kíli doesn’t think discretion is a kind of leak you get in plumbing systems) and goes off to find a raven.

 

When he finally discovers one, hunting for crumbs near the margins of a cooking fire, he is embarrassed to realize he has no way of addressing the letter; he racks his brain for some token of Tauriel and then remembers her hair, clinging like frost to every garment. It takes some hunting, but he finally discovers one of her long red strands on his jacket’s collar; he gives the strand to the raven, binds the letter to its leg, and watches it sail off after Tauriel, its shape like fluttering black ash against the smoke-grey sky.

“That’s a nice gesture,” says Bofur at Kíli’s elbow, and Kíli jumps and curses.

“I really am going to have you belled like a cat, you know.”

“Ah, you’d miss the surprise.”

“I really wouldn’t.”

“I hope you were careful in that letter,” Bofur says. “I’ve heard that some of the orc yeomen can read.”

“I’ve heard that rumor, too,” said Kíli. “I didn’t use any names.”

“Good lad,” says Bofur, and they both watch the tiny black dot of the raven getting smaller over the far hills.

“Do you think,” Kíli begins, and then finds he cannot quite finish the question.

Bofur puts his hand on Kíli’s shoulder. “Aye. I do.”

 

 ***

 

It is late in the evening, and Legolas and Tauriel have just sat down by their small campfire, when the raven arrives, hopping up to Tauriel and cocking its glossy black head as it inspects her hair. In its beak, a single red strand reflects the light. Tauriel avoids Legolas’s gaze as she pays the raven in grain from the horse’s saddlebag and undoes the leather thong binding the message to the bird’s leg. As the bird pecks at his meal, Tauriel unfolds the note briskly and reads, trying to keep her feelings from flickering over every part of her face. When she gets to the part about onion closets, however, a smile tugs at her lips before she can master it, and the subsequent struggle to get her face in order results in a rather unconvincing frown.

 

Across the fire, Legolas watches and waits. His eyes are steady. She folds the message and addresses her next remark to the fire.

“I suppose you have observed enough.”

“Yes.”

“Are you very disappointed in me,” she whispers, and Legolas does not respond, instead looking into the fire with her. In time, the silence develops in tone and depth, glimmering like the embers of the fire they focus on, and Tauriel understands his answer: that he is; that if he were forced to speak on the matter, he would be compelled by duty as well as by personal feeling to censor her; that his regard for her can be read, therefore, in his silence. Nearly three hours after asking the question, she looks across the fire at him in gratitude; Legolas simply inclines his head.

 

They have always understood each other’s silences better than they have their words.

 

 

 ***

 

It is three days’ hard travel before they enter the Forests of Greylir and Tauriel can find a private spot—in this case, up a tree—in which to write her response. The raven has been patiently following, its beady black eyes fixed on Tauriel as if it has been personally charged by Kíli not to let her out of its sight. She hopes it can remember the way back, as Kíli, the clot, has forgotten to include a hair of his own in the letter for the purposes of a return address. Three days’ travel with Legolas is quite a distance indeed, and Tauriel does not know how long the memories of mailing ravens last. She braces her back against the trunk, snugging her bootheel into the crux of a branch and balancing her writing materials on her knee. What to say? He was so complimentary. Tauriel has never had much luck with artful words—it’s why she and Legolas get along so well. Strange, that she should feel so strongly about a chatterbox; before Kíli, Tauriel would have rated a nimble tongue _very low indeed_ on her list of desirable male qualities. In fact, before meeting Kíli, any such list Tauriel could have devised would have resembled Legolas very strongly—and yet, watching Legolas move around below, Tauriel is somewhat bemused to notice that she has absolutely no desire for him. By comparison to Kíli, Legolas may as well be a favorite aunt.

 

As if sensing her thoughts, Legolas pauses underneath her tree; to annoy him, she plucks an acorn off its twig and chucks it at him. The acorn bounces off the upper leg of his bow, landing in the soft needles at his feet. His expression becomes deeply affronted. Tauriel smiles to herself; the game is begun. Legolas will not rest until he is revenged. Back to the letter.

 

_Shortest and most talkative of men; your imagination has granted me a fearsome reputation which my actual deeds cannot support. My journey has included rather less orc decapitation, and rather more marching, than I would prefer. My companion is much aggrieved by the lack of targets; I have just thrown an acorn at him to give him something to do._ She nibbles the end of her quill, trying to decide how truthful she will be. As usual, the moment the question of truthfulness enters her mind, she is compelled—rather masochistically—to reveal the thought which begged the question. _He thinks little of you,_ she writes. _However, in the six hundred years I have known him, he has also thought very little of a dozen fine kings of Erebor, a priestess who could heal grievous wounds, and several harvest moons I found exceptionally pretty._ She smiles, pleased with her backhanded compliment. Surely Kíli will catch it. But where to go from here? She re-reads his letter, by now familiar as a lullaby. An acorn flies out of nowhere and lands precisely in the center of her page. Legolas is nowhere to be seen. Tauriel picks up the tiny acorn and inspects it. It is green, plucked early from the tree. Smiling as she decides what to say, she sets her quill back to the letter. _However, I must entreat you to pity, rather than resent, my companion’s low opinion. He knows nothing whatsoever of onion closets._ There. That should do it. She puts a flourish in lieu of a signature, delaying lifting the quill from the paper as if she could reach through space and press a flourish, curling and extravagant, to Kíli himself. Then she ties the letter to the raven’s leg, feeds it a handful of breadcrumbs, and sends it on its way before setting herself the serious task of finding Legolas and putting the acorn down the back of his collar.

 

 

 

 

“I do wonder how a people used to water living could possibly have developed such a fondness for carpets,” Fíli gripes, his first words in almost six hours of backbreaking labor. They have been moving the possessions of the people of Dale from the still-smoking ruins on the lake, to the growing refugee camp on its shore. The people of Dale have a lot of things.

“This is what I have been saying!” says Kíli, who has indeed been saying this, as well as many other thoughts of a similar nature, for the last six hours. Bofur has already expressed a wish for death. “You would think the mildew alone would be a deterrent! But no, we must have tapestries, and hangings, and nice heavy carpet runners, and, and… Bofur, what is this thing?” He holds up a long, frilly piece of fabric.

“That is a bedskirt,” says Bofur. “Women use it for their time of the month.”

Kíli drops the fabric as if it was on fire and steps away hastily, and Bofur winks at Fíli. The silence lasts for a full nine seconds before Kíli asks: “Wait. How?”

“You numpty,” Oín says, waddling behind Kíli with an armload full of mixing bowls. “Bofur is pulling your leg. It has nothing whatever to do with that.”

“Spoilsport,” Bofur says over Kíli’s reflexive “I knew that.”

“You knew nothing of the sort,” Fíli tells his brother. “Pick it up out of the grass before it stains.”

“You’re only five years older,” Kíli says sourly, but obliges, holding the bedskirt at a speculative length and eyeing its lace with misgiving. “In truth, what is such a thing used for?”

“My wife had three in her trousseau and I still haven’t the faintest clue,” Bard says, heaving a massive roll of fishing nets to rest against a drying rack. “I think they are meant to collect and preserve dust.”

“Humans are very strange,” Kíli says.

“Oh, and I suppose your dwarvish women have no strange fripperies?” says Bard.

“Fripperies? No,” says Kíli. “Little insanities, yes. Our own mother could not see a child run by with an axe but she had to spit on an oilcloth and polish the edge.”

“Me mam used to do that with my hatchets _in battle_ ,” Oín says. “Drove me round the bend.”

“I had a mining partner who kept a family of moles in her beard,” says Fíli. “It was unsanitary.”

“I had a girlfriend who used to chew coal,” Bofur muses aloud. “Kept a little spitting cup and everything.”

“Well, that’ll teach me to ask questions about dwarven culture,” says Bard. “Let’s go back to the working without speaking, shall we?”

“Did it not stain her teeth?” Kíli asks Bofur.

“Oh, aye. But her breath was always very fresh.”

“I sincerely regret having started us down this path,” says Bard, and that’s when the mailing raven appears, a black dot winging down from the earthen sky to perch in front of Kíli on an upturned dresser. The other dwarves pretend not to be paying close attention as he reads the letter, but a little ripple of relief goes through the group as he reaches the end without incident and looks up, smiling and relieved.

“She is well,” he says. “Complains of a lack of orcs to kill.”

“Och, that’s a good lass you have there,” says Oín, and Kíli beams.

“Isn’t she, though?”

It occurs to all of them, too late, that Oín has just given him an opening. The monologue continues for another three hours.

 

 

 

Late that night in the small tent he shares with Fíli, Kíli rolls over on his back and stares up at the ceiling.

“I can’t sleep. Help me compose my response to her?”

“You must be joking,” Fíli groans into his bedroll. “Please be joking.”

“Do you think it’s too early to begin negotiating a betrothal?”

_“Yes.”_

“That’s what I think, too. Best let her wait on the proposal another letter or so. Girls do love anticipating things.”

“Mmph,” grunts Fíli, his eyes closed.

“On the other hand.”

_“Durin.”_

“Like grandfather always said, strike while the opponent’s club is lifted.”

“I think,” Fíli says, “That he was talking about cutting the artery located in the armpit. Not wooing a woman.”

“Do you? I always thought it was one of his life lessons, you know, a story hidden within another story.”

“No.”

“He **did** always aim for that particular spot,” Kíli muses. “But then again our ancestor was very short.”

“Look in a mirror and say that, why don’t you,” suggests Fíli.

“You’re just bitter that I have found a girlfriend and you have not on this journey.”

“You have found _trouble_ , which I have not,” says Fíli. “Has it not occurred to you that Thranduil might object to your wooing?”

“Well, he’s really not my type, though he’s very pretty—are we talking for _you?_ ”

“Why do I even bother speaking with you.”

“Because you’re my elder and you delight in telling me what to do.”

“You never listen.”

“True,” says Kíli with equanimity. “But you should certainly keep trying. You never know when I might begin.”

There is a short silence from Fíli’s side of the tent. When he speaks, his voice is gruff. “Did you know what Dís asked of me before we left?”

“You are going to say it was something revolting like, look after your poor helpless baby brother.”

“No.”

“Look after Thorin?”

“Certainly not.”

“Bofur?”

“She told me to look after no one,” says Fíli with some irritation.

“Then what?”

“She told me, Kíli will never have any trouble letting his heart run away from him. You will have great difficulty letting yours roam at all. You must seek to balance your brother’s heart, and he yours.”

Kíli lets that sink in for a moment. “Do you think that was Mother’s version of a sex talk?”

“What— _no_ ,” says Fíli. “Why must you make everything into a joke?”

“No, no, think about it. She is saying I am too careless and will sleep with any maiden I can, and that you, my brother, are far too careful and will likely die a virgin. She really does have our numbers,” Kíli says happily.

“Remember Agna,” Fíli says darkly.

“If you’re trying to upset me, I’m over that already. But tell me, did she ever speak to you as if you were a swaddled infant?”

Fíli stares up at the sagging tent fabric, jaw rippling. A beat too late, he says, “No, that was just you.”

“She _did!!”_ Kíli crows, getting up on one elbow. “What was that all about?”

Fíli closes his eyes. “I… don’t know,” he finally admits, throwing one hand up. “It was… odd.”

“Wasn’t it?!”

“I didn’t much care for it.”

“Neither did I,” says Kíli, flopping on his back. “Agna… I wonder what became of her after Smaug.”

Fíli shifts his shoulders. “Her people went up past the Iron Hills.”

“Oh yes… didn’t they have kin there?”

“On her grandmother’s side, yes.”

“Durin, Agna’s grandmother. Do you remember her story about being a little girl and seeing a stonemammoth?”

“I do,” says Fíli.

“Did you believe it?”

“Agna’s people are not known for false tales or dull memories.”

“Oh, I know. But think how old she must have been! To see a real live stonemammoth! Do you think she could possibly still be living?”

Fíli grunts, the fog of his breath visible in the cold tent above him. Outside the tent flap, a single star is visible, very far away.

After a long time, Kíli speaks again, this time more quietly. “I wonder how many of our friends we will ever see again.”

And Fíli has no answer to give.

 

 

 

 

The news, farther north, is not good. The surprising lack of orcs has slowly become a suspicious lack of orcs, then an ominous lack of orcs, and finally a _thoroughly terrifying_ lack of orcs. They are in orc country. There should be orcs. There should also be goblins, and bog trolls, and all the other nasty, ill-mannered vermin that follow in orcs’ wake and share their preference for barren landscapes, unhealthful vapors, and vast wallows of mud. Instead, there is nothing. Tauriel can remember when the spiders first invaded Mirkwood—the strange waves of game animals and their predators, running side by side heedless of each other, as if fleeing a great fire. But there was no flame. Only the terrible spiders. This quiet, emptied-out land reminds Tauriel of that time; but what terror could possibly remove the orcs from their homeland? She shares her concern with Legolas, who nods grimly. “I was thinking much the same thing,” he says, then whips around and draws dramatically on a small, approaching speck in the sky, which turns out to be a mailing raven. Legolas lowers his bow with a long-suffering sigh, and Tauriel conceals her fond smile as she reaches out to accept the raven.

“You long for activity, _mellon_ ,” Tauriel says, stroking the raven’s breast feathers with a single finger and noting the crude, blocky handwriting visible even through the paper. “How your teachers must have despaired of keeping you on a bench.”

“It has always been so,” says Legolas stiffly.

“It is no fault,” Tauriel says, gently, aware she swims against the tide of kingly opinion. She chooses her next words carefully. “It would be a poor leader of warriors, who preferred a seat in camp to a view of the enemy from the highest tree.”

Legolas looks at her, unreadable, but he allows the raven to step lightly from her arm to his so Tauriel can use both hands to undo the delicate thong binding the letter to the bird’s leg. When she has it, he steps away down the hill, allowing her to unfold her letter and read in peace.

_Tallest and most frustrated of ladies, I understand that it must be dull in the extreme to travel for days with no one to shoot, decapitate, maim, or corner in an onion closet and kiss nearly to death. I myself do love a touch of maiming when the springtime comes, and in fact there have been several battles in my family history that can be traced to just this seasonal urge, including one fought on the first of May around twelve hundred years ago against, regrettably, the elves of Mirkwood. I must beg your pardon—my ancestors were only having fun—but if you desire restitution, fairness dictates that I, their descendent, offer, in sacrificial recompense, my body._

_But please, no more Devil’s Pestilence. Anything but that. I’ll kiss you as much as you want._

_PS. My ankle is much better._

_PPS. Ask Legolas how he keeps his hair so shiny. It is bound to keep him talking for days._

_PPPS. I really will kiss you as much as you want._

 

Tauriel stands motionless in the dry grass, wind whipping around her, her own heartbeat thundering in her ears. _I really will kiss you as much as you want._ She feels as though she has been playing a child’s game in which one playmate leans back slowly and gradually against another; for the longest time, she thought she could hold up easily, but now he has thrown his full weight against her and she is staggering, toppling under her desire. It is not that Kíli has said anything particularly revealing, himself. It is that he has effortlessly deduced the ravenous hunger she thought was concealed. _It must have been all over my face,_ she thinks despairingly. _No wonder Legolas is so upset with me._

 

 

She looks to her companion, who is hoisting the raven high on his forearm. He considers the bird thoughtfully; the bird gazes right back. He really is a fine leader, of men and beasts. One day, he will be a great king, if he can bring himself to exceed his father. Tauriel has long held her tongue with regard to Thranduil’s posturing, his weakness, his ill-concealed fear that his son might one day eclipse him. It now occurs to her that, in doing so, she was herself being quite the coward. It occurs to her, for the first time, how much Legolas may have needed a friend who would speak truth. And now it may be too late. She folds the letter and tucks it in her pocket before going back down the hill.

 

 

 

Over the next three letterless weeks, Kíli does his very best to appear as though he is not actively losing his mind. It is not particularly difficult to do when there are so many people around him who are _actually losing theirs_. He really shouldn’t joke about that. It’s too terrible. But what else is there to joke about? Once you have shoveled a few thousand sackfuls of coins out of your kingdom’s central hall, buried countless desiccated dead, and thrown the good-luck rune-stone your mother gave you against a wall in frustration, you really only have one thing left to occupy your mind. And Kíli is tired of running his mind through the same tracks, again and again, like a miner’s donkey that only knows his way down the shaft and back up. What if she has changed her mind. What if she has been cut off in the northern wastelands, with no route of return. What if the orcs have taken her captive. What if she is dead. The same four thoughts, again and again, changed, stranded, captive, dead, carving their grooves into his mind with the same pitiless constancy that water uses to melt limestone. Better he should start fights with every grim dwarf in this mirthless cave than to dig those grooves any deeper.

 

And it is a mirthless cave, truly. Kíli thought when they took back Erebor that it would be a joyous occasion, an explosion of light and spring and air back into the halls he remembers as open, dazzling, sacred as the vaulted forest which Tauriel—changedstrandedcaptivedead _damnit_ —the _elves_ revere. Erebor is not like that any more, if indeed it ever was. Now, the darkness Smaug left behind him makes Kíli long for the fresh air and relative sanity of Mirkwood. The dragon sickness here is _palpable_ , it’s practically dripping down the walls, and yet the first order Thorin gives is to shut up the place, barricade the doors, block all the healthful light from getting in and the poisoned air from getting out, the better to sit and brood over his immense and indefensible fortune. And it is indefensible, no matter what Fíli says—there are fourteen of them and a smallish continent’s worth of people amassing outside, beggars and creditors and individuals with very large armies and the ability to count. There is no good way for this to end, not unless he can convince Fíli to help him physically restrain Thorin and drag him to the nearest ventilation shaft and make him take deep breaths until the sickness is purged from his body. Really, Thorin _would_ be breathing deeply, because the physical effort of ripping both Fíli and Kíli’s heads off at once and smashing them into small chunks, though it would only take Thorin a couple of minutes, would be quite exertive. So Kíli is back to having no ideas, and a heart full of terrible fears, and a pocket with a chipped rune-stone in it.

 

He runs his thumb over the rune-stone, now, looking out over the hastily erected barricades to the growing horde beyond. Somewhere in that mess, the survivors of Dale, including Bard and his family, are trying to make the best of their shattered lives, lives Kíli and his kin have helped to ruin. There is more than enough gold in the mountain to rebuild Dale ten thousand times over, and yet Thorin will not hear of reparations. “Every coin we give those people will come back to us molded to an arrow’s head,” he says, and Kíli is reminded of the strange parasite that lives in underground waters and preys on the sightless fish that are there. It eats out the tongue of its victim and then sits in its place, speaking for the fish and eating its meals. Thorin is now that fish; the dragon sickness sits in his mind, speaks through his tongue, looks through his eyes with a seething paranoia that may as well be an illustration in a dictionary of war. Mad King. Days Numbered.

 

What really gets Kíli is how _fast_ it’s all gone downhill—nearly the moment Thorin set foot in Erebor and got sight of that mountain of gold, the madness seized him and within days, they were alienating their friends and making new enemies. The worst of which, no doubt, is Thranduil. Kíli can and will fight orcs all day long, but that wily tree-wearing bugger is _crafty_ , and moreover he has something Kíli desperately wants, which gives him an advantage no orc could ever have. Well. Unless the third of Kíli’s litany of fears is true, and Tauriel is captive in the land of the orcs, in which case Thranduil can go hang, because Kíli will be making a journey north just as fast as his stubby (now slightly stubbier, on one side) legs can carry him. He reaches down, absently, to scratch that still-twinging leg, and that’s when he sees it. The mailing raven. A dark speck, growing nearer, wings churning the air as it pelts towards him across hundreds of fathoms of bright blue air, a bluish black streak winging down—then falling, and Kíli sees but does not comprehend, until he sees one of Thranduil’s archers, walking out across the mud. He leans down and scoops up the raven, sliding it off the arrow shaft. The dead raven is dropped into the mud, the arrow is put back in the archer’s quiver, and Kíli is left watching as the archer calmly returns to the encampment.

 

With his letter.

 


	4. A Problem Of The Low Ground

In the north, Tauriel and Legolas have encountered some good news, and some bad news. The bad news so drastically outweighs the good news as to make the mental construction ludicrous, but it seems important to cling to the small positives in life when confronted with a massive war encampment, one which stretches to the horizon and includes clan banners from nearly every major orc lineage known to the elves and quite a few that neither Legolas nor Tauriel has heard of.

 

The good news is that at least they have found the orcs.

 

“There must be sixty thousand of them!” Tauriel hisses to Legolas as they lay on their bellies at the crest of a scrubby, blasted ridge overlooking the orc encampment. “What the hell are we going to do?”

Legolas finishes counting the spans of orc-infested ground he can conceal with his flattened palm without moving his head—a old trick, one used by military surveyors in the evil days when men and elves fell like grass before the scythe. “There are eighty thousand.”

“As I said!” says Tauriel.

“Calm yourself,” Legolas says. “The air is against us.”

Tauriel, feeling the breeze ruffle her hair, realizes the truth of his words—the wind is shifting around them, and soon their scent will be caught and hoisted like a clan banner of their own. She presses her face to the dry, crumbling scree and wills herself to calm, praying that the cold sweat she feels evaporating off her neck will not prickle in sensitive orc noses. Legolas places a hand on her shoulderblades, pressing down, the touch oddly soothing for such a dire situation.

“We will return to Mirkwood,” he says. “And if your mailing raven finds us on the road, we will send him ahead of us to warn my father.”

Tauriel nods wordlessly, her cheek sticking to the tiny pebbles. Her heart is pounding—strange, that she should suddenly fear death so keenly, when just a handful of days before she would have spat in its face. Legolas’s hand pats her back, a little apologetically, then withdraws.

“Come,” he says, and they scoot backwards on their bellies, their clothes filling with sharp, tiny rocks. When they are far enough down the hill to crouch, they crawl, and this is moderately better except for the way it tears at the knees.

“You know,” Legolas says conversationally, his eyes fixed on the ridge’s horizon, “If they march on the Lonely Mountain, they will have to go past Mirkwood to do it.”

“I am aware,” says Tauriel, out of breath, looking over her shoulder lest they back into a trap.

Legolas says nothing for a few moments, and Tauriel wonders if she has just missed a loyalty test of some sort.

Then: “My father will not wish to involve himself in a war.”

“No,” agrees Tauriel.

“Two potential rivals weakening each other. The prudent thing is to abstain.”

“Yes.”

“Nothing to be gained from involvement.”

“No.”

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and so forth.”

“Yes,” says Tauriel, though she rather thinks that last saying does not bolster Legolas’s argument, and also that she has not heard him talk this much in at least a century. She is so busy wondering, in fact, that she almost misses the next thing that Legolas says, which would be a pity, as it nearly makes her lose her balance on the steep hillside.

 

“It will be quite a surprise to him when he finds us both in open rebellion.’

 

She gawps at him as they reach the base of the hill, rise, and dart toward the tiny escarpment where the horses are tied—Legolas says nothing more as he pulls the reins over his horse’s head, but he does meet her astonished gaze, very briefly, as they wheel their mounts around towards home. In his eyes, she sees a steady amusement.

 

He never ceases to surprise her.

 

 ***

 

 

“Well,” says Bofur. “That is a surprise.” He has joined Kíli on the barricades to look out over the broad and muddy field of tents and fires, which now stretches as far as the eye can see. “It’s gotten even bigger since the last time I decided I wasn’t going to look anymore.”

On Kíli’s other side, Fíli snorts in agreement. “I think I see every army in Middle Earth.”

“There aren’t any hobbits,” Bofur points out.

“I don’t think the hobbits have a standing army,” says Kíli.

“Well, that would explain their absence,” says Bofur. “If one existed, I’m certain we would have managed to piss them off, too.”

“Who’s pissing whom off now?” says Bilbo, appearing behind them.

“Hobbits,” Fíli says. “Do your people have an army?”

“We have a home defense, to be activated in case of emergency or threat,” says Bilbo, joining them on the ramparts and looking out over the sea of tents.

“Have they ever been activated?” asks Kíli.

“Once, about eighty-three years ago,” says Bilbo. “But it turned out to be a

feral boar, messing about in the gooseberry bushes. The home defense lured him out with potato peelings and managed to pen him. By all accounts he made a wonderful Thursmas dinner.”

They watch the armies below polishing armor and tending fires.

After a while, Bofur speaks: “One of Thranduil’s archers has got a letter we think was meant for Kíli.”

A collective yelp of consternation greets the news.

“Oh that’s not good—”

“Why is she sending ravens, anyway? Doesn’t she know it is a time of war?”

“What did the letter contain?”

“How should I know, I hadn’t **opened** it—” Kíli begins with some heat, only to be interrupted by Fíli:

“Take a _guess!_ ”

“Oh now _there’s_ a practical intelligence-gathering plan,” Kíli says, and for a moment it looks as though Fíli is going to hit him, but then Bilbo is there, edging between the two brothers.

“Easy there, friends. Please. Let’s remember what that foul dragon-air has been doing to all of our minds. I have already caught myself _twice today_ asking Oín open-ended questions.” When the chuckles have died down and everyone is feeling calm again, Bilbo continues. “Now, would it help if I went down there and tried to sneak the letter out of their camp? I am, in fact, a burglar.”

“Indeed he is,” says Bofur. “With one whole burgle to his name.”

“In fairness, it was quite a burgle,” says Bilbo.

“That it was.”

“The occupant was very distressed and not at all pleasant about it.”

“Please,” says Bofur. “Don’t remind me.”

“Bilbo, it is good of you to offer,” says Fíli, “Especially after all you have done for us. But it is for that reason that you cannot go. If Thranduil were to catch you in his camp…” he says, glancing meaningfully at the other two dwarves, and they all nod soberly. They know precisely what Thranduil would do if such a bargaining chip were to fall into his hands.

Bofur pats Bilbo on the shoulder. “If the letter were able to be retrieved, you would be the hobbit for the job,” he tells him. “But Kíli is right. The risk is too great to gain information already lost to Thranduil.” Kíli nods silently. Bofur regards him, his eyes dark with compassion. “Not that we would not all like to see Kíli’s possession returned to him,” he says quietly, and Fíli looks at the ground.

“It is all right,” Kíli says, as lightly as he can manage. “I shall take it from Thranduil’s camp myself, when this is over and we are dividing the spoils of war. What do you think the lord of Mirkwood is worth, split fourteen ways?”

“Make that five hundred and fourteen,” says Fíli, and Kíli is about to say something like, _please don’t tell me you’ve lost your mind, too,_ when he sees where his brother is looking.

 

Up to the ridge. The dark, silhouetted ridge on which five hundred heavily armed dwarves are standing. Armed to the beards and carrying the war banner of the Iron Hills.

 

 

***

 

 

 

“I have never been so glad to see Cousin Dain before,” says Kíli, pelting along behind Fíli as they race towards the center of the mountain, where Thorin will no doubt be brooding over his mountain of gold. “If anyone can talk some sense into Uncle Thorin, it will be him.”

“Have you ever _met_ Cousin Dain?” pants Fíli.

“I don’t know, have I? I thought at Aulësday for certain.”

“He is as likely to go to war with us for the fun of it as he is to aid us,” says Fíli shortly, pausing to snatch up three extra hatchets from a weapons cabinet near the door to the scullery.

“Those are decorative hatchets,” Kíli points out.

“Not in the hands of an Iron Hills dwarf,” Fíli says grimly. “They will knock the heads off and use the handles as pikes.” He dumps the hatchets into Kíli’s arms. “Find somewhere to hide these.”

“We are in an armoured cave, inside a mountain stronghold, _surrounded_ by weapons,” Kíli points out, following Fíli through the high pass overlooking the laundry. “Do you really intend to battleproof this entire mountain before Dain can enter?”

“Just what I can lay my hands on,” says Fíli, grabbing several long wooden laundry paddles and casting them into the slow-moving waters below.

“I am beginning to wonder about the state of your mind, brother,” Kíli says, watching the sluggish river, bubbling with lye, gulp down the paddles.

“Worry about Thranduil instead,” suggests Fíli, scooping up a massive armful of long iron sheet-hooks from the bracket next to the boiler kettles. “He truly means to kill you.” He hoists the hooks over his shoulder and heads up the stairway into the great hall, his voice echoing behind him. “And depending on what your lady friend wrote in that letter, he may have cause to.”

 

 

Inside the great hall, Thorin is sitting with his cheek padded moodily on his fist, idly toying with a rich jewel and looking for all the world like some bored empress, rather than the working dwarf and rightful leader of the house of Oakenshield.

“Thorin,” says Fíli, chucking the sheet-hooks on the granite floor before the throne, where they clatter like Durin’s nacht-armour over the Grey Mountains. “Arm yourself, right now.”

Kíli, who has been taking the approach-on-bended-knee-and-avoid-direct-eye-contact approach to his uncle’s insanity, stares at his brother in shock.

Thorin himself seems somewhat surprised. “What for?” he demands gruffly, a perturbed tone in his voice, like that of a bear roused from its winter slumber.

“Dain is here,” Fíli says, and with that he _climbs up to the actual throne_ , where he knocks the jewel out of Thorin’s hand and replaces it with the king’s sword. He is reaching for the king’s battle helmet when Thorin’s hand shoots out and locks over his wrist. Kíli, thinking he is about to see Fíli murdered before his eyes, stops breathing; for an entire moment the tableaux is still, and even the dust motes floating in the dim purple light of the great hall seem to freeze.

Thorin’s voice, rumbling and low from dragon sickness and disuse, is quiet. “Has Dain brought others?”

“About five hundred,” says Kíli, finding his voice. The hand on Fíli’s wrist loosens slightly.

Thorin’s eye falls on Kíli. “Are they armed?”

“Yes,” says Kíli, his eyes never leaving the king’s sword-hand.

“How?”

“Battle-axes, high and low shields, war-pigs, about a third of a ton weight of grappling iron and pikes, arrow-catcher helms,” says Kíli. “I got a good eight-second look at them.”

Thorin’s grip loosens completely and Fíli steps back, rubbing his wrist.

“Then they are here to fight elves, not us,” Thorin announces, standing and putting his helmet on. “Let us go and meet them.”

 

 

 

***

 

 

 

By the second day of travel, Tauriel can no longer hold her tongue.

“The mailing raven should have returned by now,” she says.

“I know,” says Legolas, eyes fixed on the far horizon. He’s been scanning fruitlessly since the dawn broke, Tauriel keeping an eye on the path behind them. Their horses are exhausted and plodding, but a night’s rest is impossible, what with an army of orcs—perhaps they should say **the** army of orcs—behind them.

“Do you think it was intercepted?” Tauriel asks, certain that Legolas will hear through the obvious question to the underlying one: _by who_.

“I don’t know,” Legolas says, almost certainly answering the second, unasked question.

He glances at her apologetically, but Tauriel can’t imagine what he feels bad for. It is not his fault her letter has fallen into unfriendly hands. She was just making conversation on what, in happier times, would be considered a beautiful autumn evening. Their horses snuffle at each other most unprofessionally as they amble, two abreast, taking up the entire road in a manner that would have horrified their riding instructors. They are too tired to care, and have already bribed the beasts with apples and meadow grass to continue. They are about an hour from Mirkwood now.

 

After another quarter mile of road, Legolas speaks. “When we arrive, you should busy yourself with the horses. They will need feeding and watering and a good rubdown while I consult with my father. It would be better if you were not present.”

“Agreed,” says Tauriel. “And if I should happen to saddle two of the freshest and fastest while I am down there…”

“And fill a pack with supplies?”

She smiles at him, and he sits up a little straighter. “Of course, there is the possibility this could go well.”

“There is that possibility,” she agrees.

“My father may see some advantage in siding with the dwarves.”

“He may,” she says.

He looks sideways at her, and she understands precisely how small of a possibility he believes this to be. After another quarter mile he says, speculatively, “Let us imagine for a moment that he did see the benefits of a closer alliance with the dwarves,” and Tauriel understands that the discussion has shifted subtly sideways, from military to matrimonial prospects. Since Thranduil would never make the diplomatic leap in question, the question presupposes a change of leadership. The “he” in Legolas’s supposition, therefore, is Legolas. To speak about this inevitability would be treason. To _think_ about this inevitability is simply good planning.

 

Tauriel smiles faintly ahead, signaling Legolas to continue with his thought.

“What shall he then do when the dwarves request allies for their endless warring with men and orcs and other clans of dwarf?”

It is a reasonable question. During Tauriel’s brief captaincy alone, there have been no less than three wars involving dwarves, two of which skirted elven borders. When your neighbors are as quarrelsome as muskrats, neutrality is a reasonable stance. Additionally, Thranduil’s posture of haughty neutrality is rooted in an ugly but harshly logical racial math: a dwarf lives about three hundred years. A man, less than seventy. An elf can live for nine thousand years. With that in mind, says the argument, how can the death—or, more closely to the matter, the life—of an elf be weighed in comparison to the death of a dwarf or a man? With every elf is lost a great chunk of history and lore and perspective unrivaled by any other living being in Middle Earth. Tauriel privately thinks this argument is bunk—how can an elf’s lifespan seem any longer or more precious to him than a dwarf’s lifespan to a dwarf, or a man’s to a man?—but she decides not to attack it from that angle.

 

“To ally oneself in trade is not necessarily to ally oneself in warfare,” she says. “Besides, a fair amount of dwarvish skirmishes have arisen out of their poverty, and not out of their wealth. Remember that when the dwarves possessed Erebor, before the scatterment, there were few quarrels, and those few but minor family squabbles.”

“A rich neighbor is a peaceable one?” Legolas asks, his eyebrow raised, and Tauriel shrugs in humble assent. He considers her words for some twenty paces. “The idea has merit,” he says after that time. “Especially when one considers the example of hobbits.”

Now it is Tauriel’s turn to raise her eyebrow.

Legolas continues his thought as they summit a rise covered in walnut trees. “Before meeting that party in Mirkwood, had you ever seen another hobbit?”

“No,” Tauriel says. “I was under the impression they rarely left their homeland.”

“Quite so. And have you ever visited the Shire?”

“No.”

“I have. It is a queer place, provincial yet bounteous. Their homes have all the taste and aesthetics of rabbit warrens, and their culture is a risible exercise in constant overeating. And yet for all that, they are not starving or strained, their farmland is bursting with fecundity, and they have no known enemies.”

“That seems odd,” Tauriel says.

“Indeed. Their secret is simple. They are utterly lacking in ambition. They keep only their tiny plot of countryside. There has not been an expansion of hobbits in ten thousand years. They never conquer, never branch out, never even buy new pastures, just rotate their crops onto old pasture and plant in a newly dunged field. They have never wanted greater lands, and so they have never made a single foe.” Legolas looks over to Tauriel.

“Is this the path you would put us on, were you to advise our king?”

Tauriel thinks about it for some thirty paces, making sure of her answer before replying.

“Precisely.”

Legolas looks over at her and smiles, and clucks his tongue, and they ride down the path to Mirkwood together.

 

 

Mirkwood, when they arrive, is quite empty.

 

 

 ***

 

 

“Where _is_ everybody?” says Cousin Dain upon entering the Great Hall. Under diplomatic banner, he has brought his son (confusingly also named Thorin, though this Thorin is considerably younger and, to all appearances, not mad) and a small party of bodyguards with him into the mountain. “I thought by now nearly all Durin’s Folk would have followed the news of your victory back to the Lonely Mountain.”

“It has not yet been so,” says Thorin, and the conversation falls somewhat flat until Thorin—Dain’s Thorin—speaks up. His remark is addressed to Kíli.

“Didn’t I once see you across a tug-o-war rope on Aulësday?”

Kíli squints, then brightens as the connection is made. “Yes! You were the first of the Ironfoot boys, weren’t you!”

“I was! They always put me first because I was the littlest for my age,” says Dain’s Thorin, smiling apologetically. “Not much has changed, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, same here,” says Kíli. “I find it awfully handy for getting into seams, though.”

“Yes! I once had a copper shaft going down into shale, I don’t mind telling you it was a nasty bit of narrow…”

Dain and Thorin share a single, horrified glance as the two younger dwarves begin comparing stories of tight squeezes, and Fíli drops his face into his hand. It is Bofur who brings the reminiscences to a tactful pause. “Hate to interrupt, gentlemen, but there is something of a situation brewing outside, and we’ve laid the table over here with some maps and mead for you.” As the dwarves take their seats and begin to assess the tactical situation, Kíli steals a glance across the table at Bilbo. The hobbit, adept as ever at blending into the background, is playing butler—pouring out glasses and ferrying away empty bottles—but his sharp eyes are noting every twitch of hand and cheek, cataloguing the unspoken language of diplomacy. Kíli thinks that, had Bilbo not been a burglar, he might have made an excellent spy. Of course, such an observation would be dangerous to make around Thorin, whose brain still teems with shadows and specters. Twice Thorin asks “What?” of people who have not spoken, and he keeps looking over his shoulder suddenly. It is making Cousin Dain jumpy, and Dain’s Thorin has begun to look at Kíli with curiosity. At the first opportunity for a break, the two young dwarves wander a little ways off from the group for a chat.

“So,” says Dain’s Thorin with admirable straightforwardness, “Dragon sickness.”

Kíli winces. “Fraid so. Is it that obvious?”

“Oh, no no no. Just to someone from the family, I’d imagine,” says Dain’s Thorin unconvincingly, before stroking his hand over his face and sucking in his breath. “No. Wait. Gods, I’m bad at this. I’m sorry, but yes. It’s very obvious. My father has already picked up on it.”

“Damn,” Kíli says.

“I’m sorry. I wish I could say otherwise, but there is nothing to be gained from sparing family feelings in a situation like this.”

“No, no, of course,” says Kíli. “You are quite right. It is the truth, after all.”

“How long has he been like this?”

“Ever since we got into this bloody mountain,” Kíli says, and then looks up guiltily towards the vaulted roof of the hall—it has been so long since he was in a dwarven mine that he has lost some of the habitual superstitions, including never cursing any ceiling which holds above your head.

Dain’s Thorin lets the blasphemy pass easily. “Have you any ideas about what to do?”

“Oh, gods, you would ask that,” Kíli says. “None worth the thinking, except to get Thorin out of this place and force him to take the fresh air of outdoors.”

Dain’s Thorin nods. “It seems the only possible cure. And, cousin, I don’t mind telling you that the way things are looking out there, it seems that he may be forced out-of-doors whether he wishes it or not.”

“Yes,” says Kíli grimly. “I was thinking that, too. Tell me, has everyone in Middle Earth decided to raise an army against us?”

“The hobbits have not,” Dain’s Thorin points out, and that—of course—is when Bilbo appears at Kíli’s elbow.

“The hobbits haven’t what?”

“Give it time,” Kíli says, winking at Dain’s Thorin, who must quickly stifle his chuckle.

“Nothing, Master Bilbo. Now, please tell me, for I am very curious. How came you to join my uncle’s party?”   
“Well, it wasn’t my idea,” says Bilbo, quite distracted, and Dain’s Thorin leads them all back to the planning table.

 

 

***

 

 

“Where _is_ everybody?” says Legolas, his voice echoing in the great central chamber of the King’s Tree in Mirkwood. They have been wandering up and down the hallways and arches passageways of the palace for quite some time, encountering none save the guards who opened the doors for them when they arrived. “Were it not so unseemly, I would go back and ask the guards.”

“I know,” Tauriel says, lightly vaulting over a low rail and rejoining Legolas on the walkway near the sunroom. “But we cannot possibly appear so ignorant.”

“Unthinkable.”

“Quite embarrassing.”

“Quite.”

“So.”

They look out over the empty sunroom and the solarium beyond. Legolas’s eyes slide sideways to Tauriel’s. “I’ll give you five gold if you go and ask them.”

Tauriel snorts. “And I a captain in their guard? Better you, princeling. I’ll not go for less than twenty.”

Legolas’s face darkens, and Tauriel wonders for a moment if she has gone too far—but no, he is simply rummaging around in his pockets for coin. When he finds them, he hands them to her with a long-suffering sigh. “You drive a hard bargain, Captain.”

Tauriel pockets the change with a tiny smile. Legolas, never having haggled in the marketplace, has no idea what constitutes bargaining. She would have done the errand for only ten. She lightly hops back over the rail and descends down through the mazelike forest of archways to the main doors, where she finds the two sentries standing guard like statues. There, she takes out the coins Legolas has given her.

“Ten apiece to both of you if you tell me precisely where everyone has gone and then forget I ever asked.”

 

 

 

 ***

 

 

“Oh, Gods, forget I ever asked,” Dain is groaning, his patience clearly strained after nearly four hours of uninterrupted war-planning. The initial large council thinned out precipitously after the first hour, as Dain’s bodyguards and most of the Oakenshield party tired; Bilbo, with the peerless instincts of a hobbit for the mid-afternoon meal, escorted them off to the kitchens, where they (at last checking) had ignited a small fire almost precisely next to one of the old fireplaces. This has left Dain, Thorin, Dain’s Thorin, Fíli, Kíli, and Balin to the maps. And oh, there are a lot of maps. Balin has only covered the first thirty secret entrances into the mountain, and is visibly miffed at having been interrupted before he can get to the upper-middle layer of secret entrances.

 

(This is one of the things that Kíli thinks others fail to appreciate about dwarves; their cunning. It’s good defensive propaganda that there are only one, maybe two entrances to a mountain. So of course they told Bilbo there was just the one way in, and played up the moonlight and whatnot. In reality, the Durin’s Day door was just the most reasonable entrance to try for at that time of the year with an outsider in the party. After all, what were the odds that a hobbit burglar would eventually raise an army and come back to attack—single-file—through a door that only opened once a year? Quite low. Compared to the odds of needing to make a sudden evacuation, because of fire or flood or roof collapse, the prudence of multiple exits becomes quite apparent.)

 

Right now, however, standing over a map of a mountain as riddled with potential points of entry as a coral, Dain looks like he wants to throw something. Edging away from Dain slightly, and noting the heavier paperweights on the table, Kíli begins to appreciate his brother’s plan of hiding all the edged weaponry before the relatives arrived.

“In the Iron Hills,” Dain begins, his voice rippling with menace, “War is a simple matter. You have the high ground, or you have the low. You have the advantage, or you do not and you must get it. Occasionally a river complicates matters, but again, this is the problem of the low, not the high ground. This,” and here he stabs at the map with a vicious forefinger, “is ALL low ground!!!”

“What would you have us do?” says Thorin, his voice a rusty yet menacing rumble. “Abandon our homeland a second time?”

“No, cousin, I would have you keep it,” says Dain. “But the only way you will keep it, is by leaving it and taking the battle out there!” He points emphatically towards the door of the planning chamber, an effect somewhat marred by the fact that he has chosen the wrong direction and is in fact pointing to the door leading to the kitchens. Fíli coughs tactfully and the other dwarves valiantly get their faces under control. Thorin, however, stares into his cousin’s face with frightful intensity. Dain is staring right back, neither eyelid nor mustache twitching. Kíli feels his chuckle die in his throat as he watches the two cousins face off—he is acutely aware that if negotiations break down here, Thorin is just crazy enough to attack. In the corner of his eye, he sees Fíli’s hand, which has never once left its casual rest on the handle of his sword, flex.

 

Thorin, who has some peerless instincts of his own for the dramatic, lets the moment hang for a few more beats before rising to his feet with a great chuckle and grasping Dain by the hand.

“You are right, my cousin. We will take the fight to them!”

 

 

 ***

 

 

 

Legolas, when Tauriel returns, tries to pretend he has not just been dozing in the warm sunlight. When he sees her face, his own drains of color.

“They have all gone to reclaim the white gems of Mirkwood,” she tells him, feeling numb, slightly floaty. “They are going to march on Erebor.”

Legolas acts immediately, taking her by the elbow and spinning her round as he marches her towards the stables. “Then we haven’t a moment to lose.”

“They will already be there,” she stammers. “The guards said they left nine days ago.”

“Then by my count, we have three days of diplomacy left before my father attacks,” says Legolas grimly, steering her as fast as he can through the grainery, scooping up two small saddleblankets and bridles as he goes. When they reach the stables, he thrusts them into her arms. “Get Hawk and Spindrift saddled. I’ll be right back. Don’t let Spindrift bloat her belly, you know how she hates the cinch.” He disappears into the armory, and Tauriel, feeling utterly at a loss, can do nothing but obey. She misbridles Hawk twice and he puts his ears back the third time she approaches, sensing something is wrong, but she finally gets him to take the bit and is fighting Spindrift over the cinch when Legolas reappears, weighted down with weapons. He throws them over Hawk’s back and steps in to help her with Spindrift’s cinch.

“We will ride down the mountain road,” he tells her. “It is fastest, and we may pick up some intelligence on our way about how heavily my father was armed. Have you had no new response from Kíli?”

Tauriel’s eyes flash involuntarily to Legolas’s face; it is the first time she has heard him call the dwarf by name. “No.”

“Try again,” Legolas says. “If there is any line of communication available at all, we must use it. Go and get a raven from the mews. I will finish tacking up.” He looks over his shoulder from where he is buckling the cinch to where Tauriel is standing, lost in fear. “Go!”

 

It takes Tauriel three turns past the door before she finds the mews and another five minutes looking for paper, quill and ink, but she finally manages to locate all three and gathers them up in her skirt, unlatching a raven’s cage and letting the bird, a dun little female, ragged and brownish after her molt, hop onto her arm. Perhaps an unremarkable raven will slip past Thranduil’s army unnoticed. How the bird will find its way inside the mountain, Tauriel has no idea. The idea that Kíli might already be outside the mountain, fighting for his life, she represses savagely. Returning to the stables, she finds both horses saddled and ready, Legolas holding both their reins.

“Get on,” he says. “My horse can lead yours until you have written the letter, and then we must make time.”

She climbs on and Legolas leads them out of Mirkwood at a brisk trot, which makes writing difficult. Even worse than trying to write on the back of a jouncing horse is not knowing what to say. _Please don’t hold your mountain dearer than your life. Please don’t fight my king, who has come to fight you. Please don’t be dead._ And underneath all those thoughts, a small and selfish ember. _You haven’t kissed me enough._

 

In the end, she writes only:

_Hold fast. I am coming for you._

 

 

 ***

 

 

 

“To be completely honest, if I’d known it was going to be this ugly, I would have sent some eagles for you and said the hell with Erebor,” Dain’s Thorin says, his eye to a small spyglass. He, Fíli, and Kíli have climbed up to the Copper V shaft’s third ventilation entrance to survey the massing armies, which have gotten a lot more massive in the last two hours. “Haven’t you got any other distant branches of the family you can call on when you want to take on two fucking armies?”

“We love you too, cousin,” says Kíli. “Now shut up and help us figure out a battle plan.”

“Battle plan, my lightly blushing arsehole,” grumbles Dain’s Thorin, but puts his eye back to the spyglass. Up here, just past the first plateau of the Lonely Mountain, the scree is loose and tumblish, and harbors no flowers or grass to catch the wind. It is very quiet, save the breathing of the three dwarves. Dain’s Thorin finally lowers the spyglass and gives a heavy sigh.

“Are you absolutely sure about this,” he says. “The Iron Hills are lovely this time of year.”

_“Thorin,”_ Fíli begins, looking murderous, but Dain’s Thorin waves him off. “All right, all right. Well, to begin with, your positioning is not so terrible as it looks. ‘Tis true, the elves have all the high ground outside the mountain, and the men have completely blocked your front entrance, so if you want to get out, it will have to be through them, with a hail of elvish arrows falling on your heads.”

“Get to the not-terrible part,” says Fíli.

“Well, you’ve got a mountain full of high and well-defended balconets that overlook your enemies, about a million gallons of molten metals and various tarry byproducts, and enough flammable and projectile sundries to make their lives pretty unpleasant for the foreseeable future.”

Fíli and Kíli exchange a glance. It is not a terrible plan, except that it will require restraint and patience, the two qualities that Dain The Senior and Thorin lack completely. Now that the two leaders are in accord, they expect a plan for battle, not for extended countersiege. There is an extended silence as all three contemplate the anthill-like activity below. From this distance, in the silence that lofty mountain’s height allows, the scene is almost peaceful. If you ignore the trebuchets, catapults, and war chariots.

“Of course,” Dain’s Thorin continues, “There is the old ‘run outside screaming and see how many of them we can kill before they kill us’ strategy.”

“It does seem more in keeping with cultural tradition,” Kíli says.

“That it does,” says Dain’s Thorin. “Do you ever think that our cultural traditions are very, very stupid?”

“Every single day,” says Kíli.

And Fíli says nothing at all.

 

 

 ***

 

 

By the time darkness falls over the mountain road, Tauriel is nearly asleep on her horse; she knows Legolas must be nearing the same point of collapse, though he is far too well-bred to show it. It is for her sake that he has now ridden for nearly fifty hours; she must be the one to suggest rest.

“There is a village of men some three leagues ahead,” she says. “The horses will need sleep and water by then.”

Legolas glances at the starred sky wheeling over them. “We have at least another hour before there will be wolves.”

Tauriel acknowledges the graceful lie. There have been wolf yips echoing around the mountains for nearly half an hour already, but Legolas has been ignoring them in order to get her closer to Erebor. Truly, he is a good friend as well as a fine leader. He will also drop dead of exhaustion if she does not look out for him. “I, too, will need rest before I can face battle.”

“Then it is settled,” Legolas says. “We will stop in the village.”

“Thank you, mellon.”

“You are welcome,” Legolas says, and they ride in silence for another league or so before he speaks again. “Your dwarf.”

Tauriel looks up, surprised. Legolas’s back holds no clues, though she supposes the fact that he has reverted to calling Kíli by race instead of name indicates discomfort. She waits.

“Is he worth it?”

Tauriel is surprised at the question’s bluntness. Darkness and fatigue may loosen tongues, but this is the type of thought she would not expect to hear from Legolas without at least thirteen drafts of mead behind it. _Listen to what surrounds the question_ , she reminds herself, _not just the question._ She replays Legolas’s voice in her head, separating out the tones and timbres of his voice like a weaver separating strands on a loom, noting with surprise that the dominant note is not of jealousy, but of wistfulness. What is that doing there? She plays the question again and again in her mind, finessing apart the tangle in his voice until she hears the true question, the one hiding underneath _Is he worth it. Is **it** worth it. Is **love** worth it._ Legolas, she now realizes, has never been in love. He is asking her about it, just as a leader asks a scout returning from high trees. How to describe these lands, this sunlight? It is as impossible as being asked to describe air.

“Yes,” she says simply. “He is—it is all worth it.”

 

 

***

 

 

“I take back everything I ever said about wanting to see Erebor again,” Kíli says the next morning. “This can’t possibly be worth it.”

Bofur and Kíli are standing on the ramparts with Dain’s Thorin, looking out over a panorama of armies who have stopped _amassing_ , technically, but that is only because they have begun to _teem_. _Seething_ , with all the pleasures that verb connotes, is surely imminent. Dain has already returned to his troops, with strict instructions that his son should return as soon as the morning cooking fires begin to be extinguished. After that—well.

“Take heart, Cousin Kíli,” says Dain’s Thorin. “We faced worse odds than this at the Battle of Mount Dolmed.”

“The Khazad _lost_ that battle,” Kíli points out, and Dain’s Thorin’s face goes all rheumy and confused as he thinks back to sixteenth-year history.

“Are you certain? I could have sworn we won.”

“No,” says Bofur. “In fact, there’s a Day of Grieving every other solstice to commemorate it.”

“Is _that_ what that is commemorating? I always thought we were grieving something else. Our cuisine, maybe.”

“Oh aye, that too,” says Bofur. “But mainly the many thousands slaughtered.”

They look out over the armies. Most of the activity now is cosmetic. Banners are being raised, feathered helms affixed in place, warhorses buffed to gleaming perfection. There’s an obscenity to the primping that Kíli can’t focus on too closely. Dain’s Thorin is wearing an expression that suggests similar misgivings. “Won’t do to keep my father waiting,” he says, and offers his hand to Kíli, then Bofur. “See you later on today.” He puts on his helmet and clatters down the narrow stone pathway towards the hillside where Dain’s army is making final preparations. The war-pigs snuffle and grunt; a small dun-colored raven hops through the camp, inspecting all the dwarves as they put out their cooking fires and toss their kettles on the ground. Bofur gently pats Kíli on the shoulder.

“Come, lad.”

With a last, lingering glimpse at the whitish sky, Kíli follows him inside.


	5. An Emptier Country

Later on, Tauriel will wonder how close they came to each other in battle. If, when the orcs came streaming out of the earth like ants, she and Kíli were swept past each other like swimmers caught in a flood, paddling different directions. If, standing on a high point and selecting her next arrow’s path, her gaze had raked over a melee with him in the center of it. It was not impossible. She had seen Legolas once, only the gist of him catching her eye before he was gone—in that chaos, at that speed, you never really register anything. You kick and claw and slice without pause for thought or breath. There is no room for conscious thought, for recognition, for anything but threats and their deflection. When you are done, you may look down at yourself and notice a deep wound, or that half your dress has been torn away, or that you no longer have any fingernails.

 

In Tauriel’s case, when it was all over, she looked down and found that she no longer had a heart. Certainly, there was a woman there, and she moved and walked as Tauriel had, and spoke with her tongue and looked out at the world through her eyes, but that woman was an intruder, a squatter in the vacant house where Tauriel had once lived. She floated numb through her days, a leaf curled around nothing but air. When someone called her name, more often than not it was Legolas who took her by the hand and turned her to face the appropriate direction. When it was time to eat, he fed her, and when it was time to sleep, he told her so. For her part, the reminders seemed faintly ludicrous. Who was to say when it was the correct time to rise, or eat, or wash your hair? Why was sitting on the roof at night considered a strange thing to do? Why did anyone care if she drank water from a cup, or from her hands, or from the cold and ashy center of the lake? It was only a matter of time before death came, and death would not hesitate to discover her whether she was tucked safely in bed or sitting on the edge of the roof of the mews, staring at the moon.

 

Which is where Legolas finds her, six months after the Battle of the Five Armies, bathed in the light of an exceptionally blue spring moon. Legolas has given up chiding her when he finds her in high places, though he personally has an ill-concealed dislike of heights. He simply sits and dangles his legs, looking out over Mirkwood with her in silence.

“The raven I sent never returned,” Tauriel says after some time has passed. “I thought she might, after some time. If she were disoriented, or hurt. But I suppose it is possible she is still looking for him.”

Legolas’s face does something faintly like a crumpled bedspread being snapped out and smoothed over, a wince and then gone.

“Do you think the letter got to him?” she continues, more curious than cautious of his feelings. She does not understand why Legolas has come up here to speak with her, anyway. He should know he is only throwing pebbles at the windows of an empty house.

Legolas looks down at the knee of his trousers, plucking at a bit of fray there. “I never apologized to you,” he says.

Tauriel cannot imagine how this is a response to her question. “For what?” she says.

“For not getting you to him sooner. For failing to prevent… what happened.”

Tauriel laughs out loud. Legolas looks terribly startled by it, which only makes her laugh the harder. The idea that he has been carrying around this ridiculous guilt for months is as ludicrous as it is sad. “Mellon, do you think it would have made a difference? No. No, his fate was sealed when he was born an Oakenshield,” she says. “The son of a king is always a slave to destiny.”

It occurs to her, as she says it, that she has finally delivered the killing blow. Legolas rises wordlessly and leaves, and she smiles ruefully up at the moon. Better, after all, to leave nothing behind.

 

 

***

 

 

She walks north first, as far up as the country of the orcs. She is unmolested; that country is emptier now. Occasionally, in the far distance, she sees the smoke of a small pack’s fires—but they are mainly women and children, and she feels no urge to exact revenge. Those responsible for his death are dead themselves, or ruling. She is indifferent to both. They have already taken away the part of her that feels things. She builds no fires and leaves no traces. The sky wheels, infinite and unknowable, above her.

 

When she wanders into the country of men, it is almost by accident. Villages become towns become cities, and come wintertime she finds herself living in relative anonymity in a small room above a tailor’s. She sits on her windowsill and watches snow falling.

 

In February, it occurs to her that she never actually got to hear him say the words _I love you_ to her. She is descending the darkened staircase in the early morning when the thought halts her; she stands on the stair, hearing the tailor light his lamps below, smelling the whiff of kerosene. Like ripples through a pond, Tauriel’s realization leaves behind only stillness. It does not matter, she thinks, because she knows Kíli did love her, knows it in the same bone-deep way she knew when her aim was true, that moment of utter clarity when the whole world paused and drew in breath.

 

This is the morning Tauriel goes to the tailor and asks to be apprenticed. She stays and learns the trade for four years, picking up the needle instead of the knife or the sword or the bow; the work becomes a groove, a channel she pours herself down every day, again and again and again. Out of bed, down the stairs, to the hearth and the cutting tables and the dressmaker’s doll and the sewing tables, over and over and over, until she feels as dull as a miller’s ox, endlessly turning his circular stone. One morning she overboils the porridge, and with it comes a memory: Kíli’s blood, bubbling out of his mouth in gouts. Her face must show her astonishment, because the tailor inquires after her health. She does not know how to answer: that she has had a feeling, for the first time in almost five years.

 

Next comes the memory of his voice, one afternoon, during a warm rain. The hypnotic curtain of sound has insulated the shop from passersby in the street, the clopping of horses’ hooves, all the usual hubbub. She is embroidering some white starflowers on a corset for a wedding, when she hears his voice, clear as if it were yesterday. _I said I was going to marry you once you resolved yourself into one person._

Tauriel stills; her pricked finger blooms a red rose in amongst the white starflowers. Only silence follows.

“Yes, well, you said a lot of things,” she mutters to herself, and gets to washing the stain out. The next time his voice comes unbidden she throws a knife across her bedroom in the direction of the illusion; it lodges in the doorframe and she feels rather foolish going to pull it out again. She is out of practice at knife-throwing.

 

After some time, it becomes apparent that the memories will return whether Tauriel desires them or not. Since it doesn’t matter whether she exhausts herself in fighting or gives in to lunacy completely, she chooses the path of least resistance and gives Kíli’s ghost space at her hearth. He follows her around, offering commentary on her doings:

 

“You really ought to be naked more often. Just because I’m imaginary doesn’t mean I’m not enjoying the view.”

 

“More tea? You’ll be up all night and I am only one dwarf.”

 

“It’s no wonder you became a guardswoman, you’re hopeless at housekeeping. Don’t get me wrong, I love that about you.”

 

“I love you, too,” she says absentmindedly one day—when she looks up from her handwashing, his illusion is gone.

 

She packs her bags and leaves the city, riding out into the countryside again with three bolts of fabric, the tailor’s good wishes, and her grief like a smooth black stone, worn over by fretful hands. When she rides into the Shire, Bilbo sees her first. There is a brief moment where his face does something complicated, and she understands that with her presence, a bit of the war has just come back to him. She feels the same way, looking at him—that grave, careworn face is the same face that stared at her, mute with shock and plastered with mud, on a reeking battlefield nearly five years ago. She cannot feel those years now.

 

Bilbo walks down to meet her at the garden gate, and wordlessly reaches for her horse’s reins. “You will be staying at least five fortnight,” he informs her as he cinches them to the garden gate, giving Effleet plenty of room to crop the tender grasses all around. “I don’t care if you’re due in the halls of Gondolin tomorrow.”

He then walks around and helps her down from her horse, setting her on the ground with a firmness that clearly communicates _that’s settled_.

“Ondolindë was sacked over twenty-four hundred years ago,” Tauriel tells him as she takes her sack over her shoulder and they start back up the garden path.

“Precisely,” says Bilbo without looking back.

 

She stays a good deal more than five fortnight, as they discover that they both genuinely enjoy each other’s company. War has left Bilbo considerably less inquisitive, and full many a day goes by without a word passing between them. The silence is gentle and companionable as a cat. He doesn’t mind when she spends hours sitting on the windowsill, looking out on the rain—only brings her tea. And when Tauriel finds Bilbo staring vacantly into the ashy, cold fireplace, she simply draws a blanket over his shoulders and lets him be.

 

Of course, the neighborhood is in a furor. Several of the neighbor children injure themselves trying to clamber atop Bilbo’s roof to spy on the strange elfin lady, and the gossip at the market is (by all accounts) quite _imaginatively_ vicious, but Tauriel holds her head high when running errands, and Bilbo, if he ever cared about his reputation, is quite past that now. “Tauriel, listen to me. The hell with them all,” he says. “Not a single one of those people has ever had a thought beyond the borders of the Shire.” He sets a birch log on the third fire of winter and straightens up, brushing dirt from his hands.

“I do not like them speaking ill of you, though,” says Tauriel, who is resting in the winged armchair, sipping from a large mug of steaming yarrowtea. This head cold has caught her quite off-guard.

“If they were not speaking ill of me, they would be speaking ill of someone else. That is what people here do in the winter. It’s our only sport. Well, that and conkers. Anyway, you mustn’t mind them. They would slander as gleefully someone who wore her skirts a little too brash, or failed to put his sheep in the communal pen for tending, or preferred an unusual sort of love.” Bilbo’s throat works a little around this last one, and Tauriel tucks a quiet thought away in the corner of her mind; when no commentary is forthcoming from her corner, Bilbo continues.

“You can never conform enough to suit them, and so you may as well give it up and be yourself. I have, and I suggest any lady as accomplished, and noble, and brave as yourself, should be very proud to do the same.”

Tauriel blinks wildly, attempting to get her face under control, before remembering that she is no longer in the court of Thranduil and giving up the struggle completely. As tears brim in her eyes, she smiles at Bilbo, and he smiles back at her. The snow falls silently outside.

 

 

 

As it turns out, the key to winning the hearts of a large group of hobbit gossips is not a key at all, but rather a needle. During the long winter in Bilbo’s cozy drawing room, Tauriel has little to occupy her time except her apprenticed trade; the first time she brings her needlework to market the uproar is considerable. Hobbit women are quilters and knitters by habit, but they can appreciate fine embroidery, and the elvish patterns Tauriel applies to her napkins and table runners and pocket handkerchiefs—common decorative motifs to her eyes—are apparently very exotic to theirs. She is called “dearie” by no less than six elderly women in the space of an afternoon and has sold all her wares, with more on order. In short order, she is welcomed into a quilting circle and that, as far as the community goes, is that. She is simply a very tall One of Them now.

“You should hear the gossip I’ve been privy to today,” she says as she shakes the sleet off her cloak in Bilbo’s doorway.

“Should my ears be burning?”

“No, but I think I may need to leave before I am forced to pick sides in the feud between the Clayhangers and the Noakeses.”

Bilbo makes a dismissive sound. “That still going on?”

“Oh, heavens yes. Apparently their children are being cruel to each other now in the schoolyard, behavior I can only assume they’ve learnt at their parents’ knees.”

“To think it started over a pickle recipe.”

“In another three generations, it will be war,” says Tauriel, and she is joking, but it occurs to her the next day, listening to Lalia Clayhanger rehearse her endless grievances against the Noakeses, that perhaps the joke is not very funny. She can already feel herself being pulled into the insular world of The Shire. It is very cozy and social, but the coziness feels like being smothered in a great feather blanket, and Tauriel longs to draw a deep breath of cold, fresh air. So when the spring comes, she saddles Effleet again and rides on, carrying her much-neglected weapons, her sewing kit, and a ridiculous amount of Bilbo’s larder (his face fell so dramatically when she attempted to refuse a wheel of cheese that, guiltstricken, she left behind a bolt of silk in order to accommodate it).

“You will come back to visit before the next eclipse,” he informs her sternly. “Don’t forget that your lifespan is ridiculously long compared to mine. I don’t want to wait until I am doddering and incontinent to see you again.”

“I won’t forget to visit,” Tauriel says, dabbing at her eyes. “Stop being horrid.”

“Can’t,” says Bilbo. “It’s in my nature, I’m a burglar.”

 

 

 

 

She rides down through the Southern Downs, enjoying being out-of-doors again. All the little sounds—birds foraging in the undergrowth, rain dripping off of tree leaves, the constant swirling breeze—are like a long-unheard song to her ears, one she is surprised to remember the words to. She drifts along in a trance, camping under every tree that suits her, letting Effleet lead the way. When she arrives at Mirkwood, it is almost without her permission. She looks up one day and she is there. It is as if the city has fishhooked her, slowly and steadily reeling back its own, and for a moment she resents it extremely. She pulls up on Effleet’s bridle; and then she sees Legolas, standing on the roof of the mews, watching her arrival. He has not called out, nor waved, nor sounded the alert; he is still, in a manner that suggests he has been watching her since she was a far speck on the horizon. She understands that she is being given time—time before the gates are opened and the announcement called, time before Thranduil knows she’s here—to change her mind.

 

She does not turn around.

 

 

It is a rather hellish audience with the king. Thranduil is so put out by her extended absence from court that he “forgets” to give her permission to rise, and she must respond to his queries from a deep curtsey, knees shaking and eyes downcast. Then he snaps at her to stop being a ninny and stand, as if the social breach were hers. As he pretends to be distracted by a whispering staff member, forcing Tauriel to stand at miserable attention, she notices that Legolas has entered the room and is leaning against a wall, just out of range of Thranduil’s attention. She gives him a faint flicker of a glance, sees in her periphery his smile—then he is gone again. Tauriel sighs and braces herself for another round of intrusive questioning. Privately, she thinks the king probably barely noticed her absence until her return drew attention to it—if Thranduil had truly wished to find her, he would have sent spies. Though perhaps he did, and they ranged no farther than the comfortable borders of the forest. Tauriel has been away from court. It is possible Thranduil’s grasp on power has weakened, and that he can no longer rely on his intelligence-gatherers. She waits for Thranduil to blow himself out like a guttering candle; when he finally collapses into his chair and waves her away like an annoying insect, she departs in haste and heads straight to the place she guesses Legolas will be.

 

 

“I thought I’d find you here,” she says, stepping into the mews. It’s late afternoon, and the shafts of light sliding through the mews are golden with dust.

“And find me you have,” Legolas murmurs. He is soothing a beautiful hooded kestrel, settling her on her perch. Once she rattles her feathers and begins her evening groom, he turns and crosses the room to Tauriel, opening his arms and enfolding her gently. Tauriel is so surprised it takes her some moments to return the embrace.

“I thought you hated me,” she says, muffled, into his shoulder. Tears have unexpectedly clogged her voice. “The way I left…”

“Nonsense,” says Legolas firmly. “I am only glad to see you well. Did my father give you much grieving after I left?”

“Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

“And yet nothing you deserved,” Legolas says. “You should have been welcomed as a beloved daughter of Mirkwood, with music and merriment.”

“Ahh, _mellon_. You know I would have hated such a show.”

“Still.”

“ _Still_ , fiddlesticks,” says Tauriel. “I only came back to see you, my friend.” Immediately after she says it, she realizes that it is true. The hope of making things right with Legolas is the invisible line that has snagged her and pulled her into Mirkwood again. And to think, she mistook this urge for some dark force. The only darkness here is her own guilt. She wipes her eyes.

“Come, sit down,” urges Legolas. “You look as though you have not had a good night’s rest in ages.”

“Now, there’s an awful thing to tell a lady,” says Tauriel, as they sit on one of the benches lining the leatherworking table.

“I am sorry,” says Legolas. “I am well out of practice at talking with ladies.”

Something in the set of his mouth, an embarrassed mischief, catches her attention and she turns to inspect him more completely. “Legolas.”

He smiles like the cat in cream.

“Legolas. _Mellon_ , you must tell me. What is it. _Who_ is it?”

“Oh, nothing so dramatic as that. I have just reached a few rather shocking realizations while you were gone.” He glances at her slyly. “You are not the only one who has been disappointing my father.”

Her mouth drops slowly open. “No.”

“Oh, yes.”

“ _No_.”

“Stop, you must have known.”

“I suspected, perhaps, never knew.”

“Well, now you know.”

“And no one special has prompted this realization?”

He shrugs, looks up at the ceiling with a tiny smile. “No one _very_ special. But I have hope.”

She laces her fingers through his, gives his hand a squeeze, and rests her head on his shoulder. “Then I have hope for you, too.”

He sighs with exaggerated pleasure and rests his own cheek atop her head, rubbing his thumb over her knuckles. “It is so nice to have you back to talk to,” he says conversationally.

“To talk to!” she exclaims. “You’ve done more talking in the last five minutes than you did in the whole first quarter-century you knew me!”

“Is it so? Was I that taciturn?”

“Indeed. When did you become so chatty?”

“I suppose it has been building up without you to talk to.” They sit in silence for a few moments, enjoying the growing warmth of the mews’s lanterns against the darkening evening outside. After a while, Legolas asks, “Where did you go, anyway?”

“Everywhere,” says Tauriel. “North, then west, then south a bit.”

She feels his smile on the top of her head. “Then east again.”

“Yes. Then east again.”

 

 

 

Legolas, grown even more imperious, informs her that she will stay in his quarters.

“My proclivity is the talk of the city, after all,” he says as he unrolls a sleeping mat for her. “It is not as though anyone will think anything untoward is happening.”

Tauriel watches him in amazement. “To think that, not five years ago, your father was explicitly warning me not to steal your virtue.”

Legolas smirks as he snaps a sheet out in midair and floats it down over the bedroll. “You might just have managed it then,” he tells her.

“And what a tragedy that would have been for both of us.”

“For you, certainly. I would have been very lucky indeed,” he says loyally.

“Oh, stop, we would have been miserable and you know it,” she says, stepping out of her shoes.

“You said it, _mellon_ , not I,” says Legolas, fetching a pillow from a cedar chest and coming to help Tauriel loosen the tight stays of her bodice. As he helps work the thongs through the thick leather, she feels his eyes upon her.

“Am I much changed?” she asks, lightly.

“I was just realizing,” says Legolas. “I never asked. About you and Kíli.”

“Oh.”

His hands are gentle on her shoulders. “Was there a child? Is that why you left?”  
“A _child— **no**_ ,” she sputters, turning to face him. “Is _**that**_ what people are saying?”

His shamefaced expression tells her everything she needs to know, and she snorts in annoyance, shucking the bodice to the floor and going to work on her vambrances. “Your father must have heard the rumor.”

“I did my best to dispel it, but few listened. They knew I was your friend.”

“My timing made the story convenient, I suppose.”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, _mellon_. You did nothing wrong.”

“I should have followed you.”

She shakes her head. “No. You shouldn’t have.” She goes and sits at the low writing table and begins to undo her braids.

Legolas comes and stands behind her, gently nudging her hands aside and coaxing the fine braids apart with dexterity. She relaxes into his touch, and he sifts her unbound hair through his fingers, letting its weight play across his hands. “Will you tell me where you went?”

She realizes that he is not speaking strictly about geography. “In time,” she murmurs sleepily, enjoying the furrows his fingers are digging through her hair. When he finally puts her to bed, she sleeps like the dead, and her fingers do not seek her bow.

 

 

Being back in Mirkwood is a strange business. She is not a captain of the guard any more, having fallen rather publicly from Thranduil’s favor; and yet the fact that she shares lodgings with the king’s son gives her critics pause. Not much pause, though, because their tongues are soon refueled with heated speculation as to the nature of her companionship with Legolas.

“They seem to miss the core tenet of your… idiosyncrasy,” she says, delicately, the first time Legolas brings back a bit of gossip gleaned from the laundry. Apparently, Tauriel’s moans of pleasure as Legolas plays with her hair have been overheard, and given a more salacious meaning.

“They miss a great deal many things,” Legolas says tartly, and sits down behind Tauriel with a brush. She purrs with satisfaction as he begins the nightly ritual. Legolas has become remarkably tactile in her absence. She finds it makes her sad to contemplate the reasons. “Were you terribly lonely?” she asks.

The brush stills behind her. After several moments, Legolas speaks. “I have been lonely all my life.” The brush resumes.

Tauriel swallows her tears and reaches for his hand, stilling his motion. They hold hands, awkwardly, over her shoulder, for several minutes.

 

 

Of course, she cannot stay. Mirkwood, once the grand center of her universe, now chafes at her with its smallness, its claustrophobia, its xenophobia. The palace intrigue that once felt like epic drama now strikes her as just more Noakeses and Clayhangers. Legolas, of course, argues that this is precisely why she must stay: “We need the fresh eyes of someone who has been outside our world, who has seen and lived with others,” he urges, as they climb together towards the crown of a very large spruce on the southeastern edge of the forest.

“No, what we need are more of us to leave and actually **become** others,” Tauriel says rather tartly, freeing her skirt from a clinging branch. “My experiences do no good if no one here will listen to them. Water cannot be absorbed by stone.”

Legolas still has a difficult time hearing any words against elvenkind. “You need to give them more time.”

“How much of my life shall I give to those who cannot open their minds, _mellon_?” she grumbles, not really expecting an answer. She has a piece of bark in her eye and is distracted by it, so she is surprised when she receives one.

“I have been asking myself just the same thing.”

She nearly falls out of the tree. “The heir of Mirkwood asks this?”

“Oh, stop,” Legolas says, niftily leaping from one branch to the next. It is unfair, she thinks, how good he is at climbing, when she is supposed to be the sylvan elf. “Be my companion, not my captain.”

“I could not be your captain even if I wanted to,” says Tauriel. “I am in disgrace and will likely stay so for the next thousand years.”

“My father’s memory is long, but not that long,” says Legolas. “He will forgive you in time. He will not forgive me.” They have reached the top of the climbable branches now; he sits and dangles his legs.

“Why do you think so?” asks Tauriel, sitting on the opposite branch and dangling hers. The air is fresh and pure up here, and the sunlight warm.

On the other side of the trunk, Legolas shrugs. “I reflect on him in a way which you do not.”

“Any way in which you reflect upon him can only do him credit,” Tauriel says firmly.

“I thought you were not speaking as my captain,” says Legolas.

“I speak as both your captain and your companion,” she says. “I cannot speak otherwise. You are a fine man and will make a fine king one day.”

They look out over the miles of forest. Tauriel’s next words are quiet.

“In any kingdom.”

 

 

 

Eight days later, Tauriel is startled with a mouthful of toast when Legolas returns a full hour before his usual return, bearing three traveling satchels and his very lightest quiver. His color is high, his eyes bright, and he is breathing very fast. “So, are you ready?” he says, and disappears again around the door. She hears a chuff outside the door—Effleet’s. Tauriel goes to the door and sees both Effleet and Phaira waiting outside for them, hitched to the porch railing.

“Where shall we go first?” Legolas asks from Phaira’s far side, where he is tightening her girth.

Tauriel speaks around her toast. “Go?”

“Yes. I have just told my father—we should probably go. Quickly, before he decides to close all the gates.”

Tauriel swallows her toast in one gulp.

 

 

Travel with Legolas as a companion is markedly more cheerful than her solitary wanderings had been. Freed from his father’s yoke, Legolas is a more lighthearted companion than she had remembered—he sings, starts jests, invents diversions. Today he is tempting death.

“I’ll give you the best spot by the fire tonight if you can hit that hornets’ nest with this pebble.”

“And earn myself a hundred welts to go along? I think not.”

“Come on, live a little. That nest has been dead for a hundred years.”

Tauriel eyes the grey paper nest balefully. There did not appear to be any activity. “The _best_ spot.”

“I’ll let you pick it yourself.”

She sighs heavily. Then dismounts and hands Effleet’s reins to Legolas, who looks smug. She throws the pebble at the hornet’s nest, denting it slightly but leaving it otherwise unharmed. They wait. Silence. Tauriel turns to Legolas. “That fire will feel very nice on my sore calves tonight.”

 

Then the humming starts.

 

When the swarm finally stops chasing them some seventeen miles past Gladden, Legolas has still not stopped laughing.

 

 

They ride, by mutual tacit agreement, in a southerly direction, to visit Gondor and the world of men. It is the only kingdom not tainted by their memories of the Battle of the Five Armies, and Legolas has never been. They ride up into Minas Tirith, up the steep and winding cobbled streets, past children who screech in uninhibited delight at the sight of them. Tauriel, by now used to being the exotic stranger in foreign lands, smiles at Legolas’s obvious discomfort. “They are only children, _mellon_ ,” she tells him as he squirms in the center of a small crowd of urchins, all reaching to pat Phaira on her flanks. “They will not harm you.”

Legolas answers her in Elvish. “Be that as it may, their parents should temper their curiosity with some manners.”

“And where is it written that running out of doors to greet strangers is bad manners?” Tauriel responds in the same language.

“It is…” Legolas struggles to find a toehold in courtesy. “Their hands are grubby,” he finally settles on.

“Your hands were grubby too once, as a small child,” she responds, just to see the affronted look on Legolas’s face. He was ever fastidious. They ride upwards, through ever-narrower streets festooned with hanging laundry—the look on Legolas’s face as he realizes that the citizens of Gondor dry **all** their clothing outdoors, including the unmentionables, pushes Tauriel over the edge, and her peals of laughter echo through the cavernous spaces between buildings.

When she has finally collected herself, Legolas clears his throat. “So, where shall we find lodging?”

Tauriel is surprised. “You are letting me decide?”

“Why should I not?”

She shrugs. “I thought for certain you would wish to exercise your courtly training. Do some sort of elaborate calling-card introduction at the palace.”

They both look upwards at the great imposing spire of the Citadel. At this distance, its strange peaked promontory is wreathed in cloud.

“I think not,” says Legolas firmly.

 

 

They end up staying in a small inn run by a man with three children, a little younger than Bard’s children—Legolas and Tauriel share a glance over dinner, enough to know that they are both remembering those few nights in Laketown, before the dragon, before the war, when all their friends were still alive. But the smallest girl distracts them from their melancholy thoughts by climbing onto the bench next to Tauriel and demanding a song.

“A song!” says Tauriel, delighted. “What makes you think I know a song?”

“All elves sing,” says the little girl with conviction.

“Did you hear that, _mellon_?” Tauriel says to Legolas.

“She has clearly never heard you sing.”

“Lies, all lies,” Tauriel says. “I’ll have you know, I have a very fine voice,” she informs the little girl, who smiles up at her.

“Like a bullfrog,” says Legolas, and the child giggles harder. “Croak, croak.”

Tauriel raises her eyebrows at Legolas. “If you slander my singing voice, than I believe it falls to you to entertain the child.”

“Shall I?” says Legolas, and when the child claps her hands, he surprises all in the dining room by launching into a very fine rendition of “Five Falling Leaves” and then “A Miss, a miss, amiss”. By the time he ends the song, five other patrons have joined in the chorus, and a round of applause caps the performance. The child is utterly spellbound, staring at Legolas raptly as she winds her blond curls around her index finger. “I think you have a new love interest,” Tauriel says confidentially to Legolas.   
“She only likes me for my hair,” he whispers back, but their conference is hushed by the strange, haunting rise of a dwarven mining song from two tables over. The five dwarves there are work-worn and bristling with weaponry, but the song is wistful, nearly romantic—it tells of a dwarven lover, cut off from his sweetheart by a collapsing seam, and builds to a quavering climax as, dying, he dreams a pinhole of light leading to her smile. When the song ends, the inn is silent, dumbstruck; Tauriel’s eyes are brimming and the innkeeper is visibly fighting to control his emotions. The dwarves look slightly embarrassed, and Legolas hastens to buy their next round, lest their embarrassment turn into belligerence. Wiping his eyes on his apron, the innkeeper brings out sloshing tankards, and Legolas makes himself welcome at the dwarves’ table. Soon, a more cheerful washing tune has risen, the chorus of which slyly compliments the wrist technique involved in scrubbing out a stain. Not to be outdone, the men contribute some folk tunes of Gondor so baudy that the blushing innkeeper sends his children to bed. Looking around the happy, harmonious room of men, elves and dwarves, Tauriel feels the tiny seed of an idea, unfurling its first leaves towards the sun.


	6. The Story Seller

“I think it is a splendid idea,” says Bilbo over tea and scones, fourteen months later. “I cannot believe that no one has had it yet.”

“Really?” says Tauriel. “You’re not just saying that?”

“I am a burglar, not a flatterer,” says Bilbo. “It is a wonderful idea. How can I help?”

Tauriel grins broadly. “You can start by helping me butter up Lalia Clayhanger.”

Bilbo’s face falls. “Must we really start with her.”

“We must. She has the best patterns of all, and she’ll be offended if we don’t reach out to her first.”

“Well then,” says Bilbo, heaving himself out of his recliner with a sigh, “I think we should start airing the plum wine now, don’t you?”

 

 

As it turns out, Lalia Clayhanger is more than willing to sell her beautiful quilts to men, elves, “even orcs if it come to that”—but she shuts right down at the possibility that one of her works might fall into the hands of a dwarf. Apparently, her great-great-great-uncle Oiram was killed by a dwarf some two hundred and seventy years ago, and her family has been nursing a simmering ethnic resentment ever since. If Tauriel is reading between the lines of Lalia’s story correctly, the cause of death was an accident; but it has been much burnished in the retelling, and their hostess tells the story with obvious relish. They wait politely through it, and when Lalia goes to the kitchen to fetch them more tea, have a quick and whispered conference.

“Did I understand that correctly, that he simply passed out in his own waste and was hit in the head with a hand-axe used in bar games?”

“All the Clayhangers are drunks,” Bilbo whispers back. “Haven’t you noticed how she’s laced the tea?”

Tauriel had not, in fact, noticed. “How are we going to convince her to sell?”

Bilbo glances up at their approaching hostess, who is carrying a very large tray of tea and cookies down the passage toward them. “You just leave that to me.”

 

 

Three hours later, Tauriel and Bilbo take their leave, a slightly misty Lalia Clayhanger standing at her door and waving her hanky after them as they navigate the garden steps, carefully—they are both rather burdened down with quilts.

“That was,” Tauriel whispers to Bilbo as they latch the gate behind themselves, “extraordinary.”

“Hardly.”

“I am serious. That was…” Tauriel searches for the words, settling on the ones she feels certain Kíli would have chosen. “An aria of bullshit.”

Bilbo snorts a startled laugh. “You think?”

“No, no, you have a talent. That part where you convinced her that _her own great-uncle_ would have wanted her to make peace? The very one who died! You had her eating out of your hand!”

“First, it was her great-great-great uncle—”

“Ah yes, Oiram, how could I forget.”

“—And second, it was a bit of doddle. Lalia Clayhanger wants nothing more than to feel special. She was the fifth child of eight, you know? No attention in that.”

Tauriel considers the prospect as they wander home under a thick chandelier of winter stars. Few elves have more than one sibling. “I can’t even imagine.”

“Well, you elves like your space,” Bilbo says kindly. “But we like our coziness, and the Clayhangers were cozier than most. If I were Lalia, I’d probably have told you nine more stories before I agreed to sell.”

Tauriel pauses in front of Bilbo’s garden gate. “Is that all she wanted, you think? An audience?”

“Oh yes,” says Bilbo. “Of course.”

Tauriel narrows her eyes at him. “Quolla Noakes has the best cross stitch patterns in the Shire. What does _she_ want?”

Bilbo sighs, pats her hand, opens the garden gate. “Don’t you worry about Quolla Noakes. I’ll get you what you need. Before I do, though, I need some of that plum wine. I’ve been imagining it all evening.”

 

 

Bilbo is as good as his word. By the time Tauriel leaves the Shire, her newly acquired cart is loaded down with the finest goods hobbits can craft—Quolla Noakes’s cross stitches, Lalia’s quilts, the Goodenoughs’ woodwork, the Took’s upholstery. It is the very first trading cart of its kind ever to leave the Shire. Tauriel is worried that her scheme will not work; that the pull of the exotic will not be enough to overcome the lull of the familiar. But when she pulls into the newly reconstructed Dale, and before the end of the day has sold fully a quarter of her cargo (the people of Dale apparently have a great enthusiasm for bedskirts), she realizes that the problem will not be in convincing the different cultures of Middle Earth to overcome their mistrusts and grievances enough to try each other’s simple home goods. The problem will be in finding a large enough cart.

 

 

The elves, predictably, take the longest to come around.

“So you are a tradeswoman now,” Thranduil says, with withering disdain, the first time she returns to Mirkwood, her cart laden down with the goods not only of the Shire, but also of the reconstructed Dale, of Rohan and Gondor, of Eriador and Rhun and the Iron Hills.

“Yes,” she says simply, rather than pointing out that receiving a mere tradeswoman is rather beneath the king. She suspects that Thranduil’s curiosity has overcome his regal dignity in this case.

“Of housewares,” says Thranduil, his tone veering from disdain into incredulity.

She must think of some way to explain herself, before he accuses her of some grand espionage. “Of stories,” she says, and finds herself as surprised as her king by the word.

“Of stories?”

“Yes, my lord.”

Thranduil opens his hand slightly, an indication to continue. Out of the corner of her eye, Tauriel sees Legolas lean forward slightly, eyes shining. She swallows.

“I sell the goods of many peoples, it is true,” she says. “But an item is inert without its story. My lord, you went to war to retrieve the white gems from the mountain, because they held the starlight, and that is sacred to our people. But to Thorin, they were valueless, because only craftsmanship and use can confer value to the Khazad, and the gems were not crafted, but existed before us. How much blood could have been spared if both dwarves and elves had understood each other better? The hobbits of the Shire make beautiful quilts, but only they can read the genealogy hidden in each quilt’s border pattern that tells of the family who made it. How much richer could our understanding of history be if we spoke this language, hidden in plan sight? We live in this world together, and yet we know nothing of each other. And our mistrust leads to war, and terrible loss. I am no diplomat, as you know, my lord, and Legolas assures me I cannot sing. So I will carry the goods, and tell their stories, to anyone who will listen.” Hearing herself talk more in two minutes than she has in the last twenty years, she closes her mouth hastily, and waits for Thranduil’s judgment, his dismissal.

 

The expected censure does not come. After several moments, she looks up. Thranduil, looking peevish, waves her aside without further comment—tacit permission to continue her business. Legolas is smiling at her from across the room, broad and beaming. He nods to her, and she knows she has done well.

 

 

 

 

Sometimes, it is still very hard. She drives out under the stars on the Withered Heath, and the loneliness of her position—always traveling, never settling—makes her throat ache. Lying awake in a noisy, smoke-choked inn, she wishes herself back home among the stately trees and infinite silence of Mirkwood. Sometimes, the glint of a dwarven hand-axe will set her to crying, and she cannot explain why. But these moments pass. The inn quiets and the innkeeper whistles “Five Falling Leaves” as he sweeps up for the night. A dwarf from the Iron Hills smiles a certain way, and she sees him.

 

Her business plan, if that’s what such a wisp of optimism can be called, works: a fishwife in Dale asks her if she has any more of that “beau-iful elven gossamer, what’s for religious usage”, and together they make a bridal veil for her daughter, airy as meringue, embroidered with the elvish prayer for long life. A Took agrees to try a fishing net from Dale, and he and Tauriel spend a scorching midsummer afternoon on the dock of the minnow pond, casting the heavy circle again and again, until he gets the hang of it. A rider of Rohan, who has lost his dominant hand in battle, commissions the dwarves of the Iron Hills to build him a new, metal arm, with joints of leather—and waits patiently for Tauriel to make the long loop around Middle Earth and deliver his hand, the next spring, after the rains come.

 

 

 

She does not marry. She cannot seem to pry her heart free from the sticking point; and after many years, she stops trying to. She allows herself to become decidedly odd. She tells stories to strangers, no matter how it startles them. She drives into orc country and has many adventures there. Her name is known to all the small children of the many cities along her annual route—she is the lady who brings them new songs, and games, and stories, and who can be convinced to play hopscotch and tug-of-war, although their own parents cannot. They come rushing out to greet her, a little taller every year, until they are bringing their own small children to the cart and lifting them up to be cooed over.

 

And her life is not friendless: Legolas appears at unpredictable intervals for a week, a month at a time, and rides along on the cart, bringing songs and laughter with him and vanishing again when adventure calls him elsewhere. She unfolds a blanket and finds a packet of figs, tucked secretly into her belongings by Bilbo when last she passed through the Shire. Bard’s daughter Sigrid, by now fully grown with three fine children and a good head for numbers, does Tauriel’s accounting every time she passes through Dale. “I don’t know how you ever managed without me,” she scolds Tauriel gently. Her remonstrance is slightly undermined by her position, as Tauriel is half-asleep on the kitchen bench, her head in Sigrid’s lap as the younger woman fusses with her hair. It has been a long and rainy season, and Tauriel arrived chilled to the bone and nursing a bit of a cough. She always seems to get one when she nears Dale—perhaps it is the dampness, or the vapors of the lake. Perhaps it is just the knowledge that Sigrid will care for her, and fuss over her, and insist that she stay an extra week with the family who share her happiest memory. Even now, as she relaxes into sleep, it is impossible to say whether it is a dream or the feeling of fingers in her hair that makes her smile; if it is a memory that brings the tears, or the lingering scent of onions.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This fic owes a great deal to two amazing writers, one who knows exactly what a pain in the ass I am to work with, and one who hasn't got the faintest clue. Here they are: 
> 
> Firstly: I would be remiss if I did not issue a blanket statement of thanks/credit/blame for this story's inspiration to screamlet, whose incredible ["Dwarf-Elf Relations at the Close of the Third Age"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2771993) introduced me to the staggering idea that *Tolkien's world could be made funny through the cunning technique of NOT HAVING TOLKIEN WRITING IT*, and then proceeded to prove the theory by writing seven thousand words of hysterical, sexy, uplifting fic. Go read it. Go read it right now. It's everything this fic wants to be when it grows up.
> 
>  
> 
> Finally: the existence of this completed story is 100% due to the effort and encouragement of my peerless beta, JenTheSweetie, whose kind and remorseless cheerleading has made the difference between a folder of false starts and never-returned-to attempts, and the published existence of a bunch of fic that has my name on it. She has listened to me rant and rave about everything that's wrong with war movies more than any one human being should have to; she has patiently corrected my spelling, gross cultural errors, and geographical ignorance within the context of Middle Earth (a topic on which she is expert and I am... not); she has listened to me whine about the difficulty of finding the little dotty thing that goes above "Aulësday". She is the best beta a writer could have, and I love her dearly.


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